fake slate elector grn bay sweep

6 22 dunno if we need this disambig /sep node

tho central and there were different prongs to coup

MERRI OK

see state gop esp AZ, GA, MI, WI, PA

see wisc fake electors start of disambig

SEE PARDON TRUMP ED FUCKING MARTIN 11 25

LINDSAY GRAHAM KNEW TRUMP LOST GA

Groups from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all allegedly met in December 2020 and sent lists of so-called alternate electors to the National Archives after the 2020 election.

aha doh note racism of big lie cities POC

heavy rep troll and freedom caucus

bold lost 8 23

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questions: how many states? all swing?

how much CNP, cleta, ginni involvement?

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MICh prosecutes nessle? cop at door said talked to feds 6 24

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WOW AN 1 26

When Donald Trump was facing four criminal indictments, two of them stemmed from his efforts to overturn the United States' 2020 presidential election results: a federal case prosecuted by then-special counsel Jack Smith for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and a Georgia case prosecuted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Both of those cases were doomed when Trump narrowly defeated Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024.

In 2020, Trump and his allies claimed, without evidence, that Democrats stole Georgia's electoral votes from him — a claim that two prominent Republicans in the Peach State, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pushed backed against. Kemp and Raffensperger adamantly maintained that then-President-elect Joe Biden won Georgia fair and square.

Kemp and Raffensperger spoke publicly and on the record. But according to New York Times reporters Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim, other Republicans spoke candidly about Georgia's 2020 election results in closed-door testimony from 2022.

In an article published on January 13, Fausset and Hakim explain, "Transcripts of secret grand jury testimony from the Georgia election interference case against Mr. Trump and his allies, obtained this week by the New York Times, show just how alarmed and exasperated a number of senior Republicans felt about the president's efforts to overturn an American presidential election. The testimony, given in 2022, is emerging at a time when Mr. Trump is again raising complaints about his 2020 defeat and voicing regret that he did not order the National Guard to seize voting machines after the election."

Those transcripts, according to the Times reporters, "were part of the investigative file" in Willis' election interference/RICO case against Trump and others and were "conducted by a special purpose grand jury."

Republicans who testified included Kemp, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and former Georgia House Speaker David Ralston.

Describing the testimony, Fausset and Hakim report, "Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina found President Trump's claims of election fraud in 2020 'unnerving.' Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia described Mr. Trump's efforts to get his state's lawmakers to intervene a 'fruitless exercise.' David Ralston, a former speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, called the plan to create slates of fake pro-Trump electors in states he had lost 'the craziest thing I’ve heard.'"

Graham, according to Fausset and Hakim, had no doubt that Biden won Georgia when he spoke to the grand jurors in 2022.

Graham testified, "I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short…. If you told him Martians came and stole votes, he'd be inclined to believe it."

Recalling a conversation with Trump after the 2020 election, Ralston testified that "right off the bat, I've got to tell him I disagree with him."

*Read Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim's full article for The New York Times at this link (subscription required).

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an 11 11 25

Georgia election officials fight back against Trump’s 'fixation on 2020'

Adam Lynch

Case against Arizona's fake electors plows ahead— despite Trump's intervention

Jerod Macdonald-Evoy, Arizona Mirror

Trump pardon of 2020 election deniers does not erase Fulton County charges

Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder

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Case against Arizona's fake electors plows ahead— despite Trump's intervention

Jerod Macdonald-Evoy, Arizona Mirror

President Donald Trump pardoned Arizona’s “fake electors” over the weekend along with a number of other high-profile supporters who spread election misinformation and attempted to help the President overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Last year, the fake electors were indicted by a grand jury for signing bogus documents claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, after Trump’s campaign allegedly urged them to do so.

Trump is identified in the indictment as “unindicted co-conspirator 1.”

In April 2024, an Arizona grand jury indicted 18 people for their involvement in efforts to fraudulently overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election after Democrat Joe Biden won the state by around 10,000 votes.

All of the fake electors involved in the scheme were indicted, including Arizona Sen. Jake Hoffman, leader of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, former Arizona Sen. Anthony Kern, member of the Arizona Freedom Caucus and Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point Action USA COO.

In May, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers agreed with arguments from attorneys representing the fake electors that prosecutors had failed to disclose the full text of the Electoral Count Act to the members of the grand jury prior to the indictment. Myers ruled that Mayes would have to convene a new grand jury and share the text of the act in its entirety if she wanted to move forward with the case. An appeals court didn’t take up the matter.

Trump pardoned Hoffman, Kern and Bowyer, along with others involved along with others involved with similar schemes in other states. However, the pardon only applies to federal charges, so the Arizona indictment brought by Attorney General Kris Mayes would not be impacted.

Both Wisconsin and Nevada still have similar ongoing cases.

A spokesperson for Mayes said the pardon will “have no impact on the state’s case” and declined to comment further.

Those indicted for being fake electors in the scheme and named in the pardon are:

Kelli Ward, former AZGOP chairman
Arizona Sen. Jake Hoffman, leader of the Arizona Freedom Caucus
Former Arizona Sen. Anthony Kern
Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point Action USA CEO
Michael Ward, husband of Kelli Ward
Nancy Cottle, a Republican who’s been active in local politics for a decade
James Lamon, a failed 2022 U.S. Senate candidate
Robert Montgomery, former chairman of the Cochise County Republican Committee
Samuel Moorhead, former chairman of Gila County Republican Party
Lorraine Pellegrino, former president of the Ahwatukee Republican Women
Gregory Safsten, former executive director of the AZGOP

The case brought by Mayes is facing an upcoming deadline on Nov. 21 where the Democratic AG can choose to either allow the case to be dismissed or revive it. Mayes indicated to local NBC affiliate 12News over the weekend that she may drop the case.

Each of the 11 Trump electors was charged with nine felonies related to trying to subvert the election, including conspiracy, fraud and forgery. All of the defendants pleaded not guilty.

Attempts to reach those named in the pardon went unanswered or declined to comment due to the nature of the on-going case.

The indictments also included other people who worked for the Trump campaign or alongside it to facilitate the fake electors’ work:

Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for Trump and one of the main points of contact for the Trump campaign as it sought to overturn the 2020 election and ensure Trump would serve a second term
Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s chief of staff in 2020
Christina Bobb, the Republican National Committee’s senior counsel for election integrity and a former attorney for the Trump campaign who was accused in the indictment of making “false claims of widespread election fraud in Arizona and in six other states.”
John Eastman, a former Trump lawyer who is facing possible disbarment in California for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump aide who is still one of the former president’s advisors.
Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for the Trump campaign and a conservative media personality who was censuredfor making false statements about the 2020 election, and who pleaded guilty in October to a felony charge in Georgia for her attempts to overturn the election results.
Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign aide who was also indicted in the Georgia case.

Giuliani, Meadows, Bobb, Eastman, Epshteyn and Ellis are also included in the same pardon. In total, Trump pardoned 77 people involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Sean Morales-Doyle, Director of Voting Rights and Elections at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Arizona Mirror that the pardon sends a message to those who may try to subvert future elections that they’ll have the backing of the president, much like his pardon of those involved in the January 6 insurrection sent a similar message.

“I think (the pardon) is a shift in the environment in which people are acting and people who might be tempted to try to challenge legitimate outcomes and subvert the outcomes of elections have to think about the consequences of doing that and this changes the set of outcomes they may face,” Morales-Doyle said, noting that Trump’s pardon will not impact state or local charges. “Unequivocally, the president has no authority over state criminal prosecutions.”

Despite that, Trump and his allies have been attempting to push the boundaries of his federal powers. In March, Trump issued an executive order aimed at voting, seeking to add a requirement to show a passport or similar proof of citizenship to vote, but the courts placed a permanent injunction on it on Halloween, citing that the president has no authority over elections because the Constitution plainly gives that power to states and Congress.

While Trump may have the ability to pardon his allies, Morales-Doyle noted that states and local governments still have the ability to enforce their own laws that Trump cannot issue pardons for, creating additional checks and balances.

However, it is all part of a “broader trend” that has Morales-Doyle worried.

“It is a shame, but it is true that our federal law enforcement, our system of federal law enforcement, has become increasingly politicized under this administration,” Morales-Doyle said.

This politicization is part of a “broader strategy to undermine our elections” where federal law enforcement is used to pursue bogus election fraud claims along with other efforts to undermine the election, Morales-Doyle said.

---

lifezette

Trump Grants Sweeping Pardons to Dozens Targeted After 2020 Election [WATCH]

By LifeZette News Staff

November 10, 2025

Image Credit: Brian Jason - Shutterstock.com

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President Donald Trump has issued a broad pardon proclamation extending clemency to dozens of allies who faced prosecution over efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The order, signed and released by the White House, declares the pardons part of an effort to correct what the president called a “grave national injustice” and move toward “national reconciliation.”

“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 presidential election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” the document reads.

MORE NEWS: British Artist Depicts Trump as Executed Prisoner in Swiss Display [WATCH]

The proclamation grants “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of presidential electors, whether or not recognized by any state or state official in connection with the 2020 presidential election, as well as for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 presidential election.”

Among those named are several high-profile figures who became central to post-election investigations, including Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal attorney and former mayor of New York; John Eastman, one of Trump’s lawyers involved in election-related legal strategies; and Tyler Bowyer, a senior member of Turning Point USA.

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In total, the list includes more than 70 individuals. The names listed in the document include Mark Amick, Kathy Berden, Christina Bobb, Joseph Brannan, Carol Brunner, Mary Buestrin, Darryl Carlson, James “Ken” Carroll, Brad Carver, Robert Cheeley, Kenneth Chesebro, Hank Choate, Jeffrey Clark, Vikki Consiglio, Nancy Cottle, James DeGraffenreid, John Downey, Jenna Ellis, Boris Epshteyn, Amy Facchinello, Bill Feehan, Carolyn Fisher, Harrison Floyd, Clifford Frost, Kay Godwin, Edward Scott Grabins, Stanley Grot, John Haggard, Scott Hall, Misty Hampton, David G. Hanna, Mark Hennessy, Mari-Ann Henry, Durward James Hindle III, Andrew Hitt, Jake Hoffman, Burt Jones, Anthony T. Kern, Kathy Kiernen, Timothy King, Trevian Kutti, James Lamon, Cathleen Latham, Jesse Law, Stephen Lee, Michele Lundgren, Meshawn Maddock, Michael McDonald, Mark Meadows, Shawn Meehan, Robert Montgomery, Daryl Moody, Samuel I. Moorhead, Loraine Pellegrino, Sidney Powell, James Renner, Eileen Rice, Mayra Rodriguez, Mike Roman, Rose Rook, Kelly Ruh, Greg Safsten, David Shafer, Marian Sheridan, Ray Stallings Smith III, Robert F. Spindell Jr., Shawn Still, Ken Thompson, Pam Travis, James Troupis, Kent Vanderwood, Kelli Ward, Michael Ward, and C.B. Yadav.

The proclamation notes that the pardon applies only to those whose conduct was directly related to post-election challenges or alternate elector efforts, as well as activities tied to investigating or exposing alleged voting irregularities.

In a statement posted to X, Bowyer expressed gratitude toward President Trump and others who supported those charged in connection with the post-election cases.

“I am very grateful for the support of the President and his pardon attorney Ed Martin, and the many who have looked out for us since this expensive injustice has taken place in the swing states,” he wrote.

“We were targeted to sideline many of us politically. It has nearly bankrupted and caused severe trauma to many good people on this list—this is why it is important to get to the bottom of what was carried out against good faith and active citizens who took to the courts to ask questions about the 2020 election.”

MORE NEWS: Schumer Loses Grip as Eight Democrats Join GOP to Reopen Government [WATCH]

While the proclamation offers comprehensive relief for those prosecuted or investigated, it explicitly excludes President Trump himself.

00:22 / 00:46

“This pardon does not apply to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump,” the document states.

That clarification ensures that any ongoing or future legal proceedings involving the president personally are not affected by the order.

MORE NEWS: Billy Bob Thornton Tells Hollywood Elites to ‘Accept Your Little Award and Fk Off’ [WATCH]

The move, however, effectively brings to a close years of prosecutions, investigations, and civil actions targeting individuals tied to Trump’s post-election legal and political efforts.

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1 25 politico

special counsel Jack Smith’s just-released report provides fresh insights into his bid to hold Donald Trump responsible for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Smith insisted he amassed enough evidence to win a conviction if the case had made it to trial, and he laid out a comprehensive compendium of the facts he might have presented to a jury. At the same time, his report struck a defensive tone, as he sought to explain why the case never made it that far.

The public report is also incomplete. Its second volume, which pertains to Smith’s investigation of the classified documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office in 2021, remains secret.

Attorney General Merrick Garland does not intend to publicly release that portion of the report, though he wants to share it with select lawmakers. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has blocked any dissemination of it outside the Justice Department. And once Trump is inaugurated next week and assumes control of the department, it will be easy for him to forestall any formal release of Smith’s final assessment of the documents case.

Trump slams 'nut job' Jack Smith after judge temporarily blocks report

Still, the 137-page write-up on the election case is a final accounting of how Trump sought to derail the transfer of power four years ago, how investigators built and litigated an unprecedented conspiracy prosecution against a former president, and how that prosecution fizzled when Trump won back the White House.

Here are POLITICO’s top takeaways from the historic document.

Smith comes to Garland’s defense

A common sentiment on the left is that Garland was too deferential to Trump after Joe Biden took office and failed to unleash the full might of the department on the former president for nearly two years. The delay, critics say, made it much more difficult for Smith — once he was appointed in November 2022 — to bring Trump to trial before the 2024 election.

But Smith’s report emphasized that the Justice Department was aggressively investigating leads related to Trump long before the special counsel’s tenure began. Litigation tactics by Trump and his allies, Smith argued, were the key factors that slowed the process to a crawl.

For example, Twitter, newly purchased by Elon Musk, delayed Smith’s effort to access Trump’s account data for weeks despite a court order that ultimately resulted in the company being held in contempt and fined $350,000.

It took Smith more than a year to obtain text messages between Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. And the department spent months fighting to access communications of John Eastman, a lawyer who helped devise Trump’s last-ditch efforts to remain in power.

The most protracted battles of all stemmed from Trump’s “broad invocation of executive privilege to try to prevent witnesses from providing evidence,” Smith wrote. It took months of secretive legal proceedings to secure testimony from Trump White House aides such as Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino and Pat Cipollone. Former Vice President Mike Pence also resisted testifying until a court ordered him to reveal some — but not all — details about his interactions with Trump. Smith noted that judges broadly rejected Trump’s privilege claims, with one holding that he was engaged in an “obvious” effort to delay the investigation.

Smith also drew attention to what may have been his biggest foil: the Supreme Court. He pointed out that the justices rebuffed his effort to put Trump’s presidential immunity claims on a similar timetable to the one the court adopted five decades earlier in litigation over Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s tapes.

And Smith argued that the Supreme Court’s resolution of Trump’s immunity assertion essentially guaranteed another round of litigation that would have been all but certain to return to the justices if Trump had not won the election and the prosecution had continued.

Smith’s path not taken: An insurrection charge

Much of Smith’s report amounts to a justification of the special counsel’s “charging decisions” — his reasons for bringing four felony counts against the former president. Smith also explained publicly for the first time his decision not to charge Trump with one of the gravest potential crimes in DOJ’s arsenal: inciting insurrection.

The bottom line, Smith said, was legal uncertainty about the federal insurrection statute. The law had not been used in 100 years. It may not have applied to a situation in which a sitting president sought to illegally retain power rather than an outside force seeking to depose a lawful administration. And, in a notable concession to Trump, Smith acknowledged the evidence didn’t show that Trump intended to cause “the full scope” of violence that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The evidence established that the violence was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay,” Smith concluded. But federal investigators, he said, “did not develop direct evidence — such as an explicit admission or communication with co-conspirators — of Mr. Trump’s subjective intent to cause the full scope of the violence.”

A few tantalizing tidbits of evidence

Much of the evidence that Smith recounted has already appeared in prior court filings or was unearthed by the congressional investigation into Jan. 6. But there were a few striking new details in Smith’s report:

A Signal exchange between Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark in which Clark indicated a classified review of potential voter fraud evidence found “nothing helpful to P” — shorthand for President Trump.

Details of interviews with Trump’s fake electors in which some described concerns about being duped into a plan intended to “overthrow the government.”

An analysis that found Trump was watching Fox News on Jan. 6 when the broadcast aired an interview with a supporter marching to the Capitol who berated Pence for refusing Trump’s pressure to overturn the election. Moments later, Smith noted, Trump tweeted an attack on Pence, fueling the anger of the mob just as Pence was being evacuated to safety.

Will the public get to see the primary documents?

Smith’s report described the trove of evidence he assembled in narrative form. But the fate of the trove itself could be even more significant than his ultimate conclusions.

The House Jan. 6 select committee similarly mounted a two-year investigation and produced a voluminous final report. But it was the committee’s enormous cache of witness transcripts and primary source documents — drawn from Trump’s files in the National Archives, emails obtained through subpoenas and evidence produced during court battles — that has proved more enduring.

Smith reached into areas the select committee could not, getting grand jury testimony from Pence, Meadows and other top aides, including some returning to the White House next week. Those transcripts remain sealed, but there are several legal efforts underway to bring them into public view.

The Justice Department is due to respond to two of those efforts this week, a potential window into whether prosecutors may deem the public interest in the underlying materials of greater value than their continued secrecy, particularly now that the criminal case has been dropped.

===

AN 12 24

Two of President-elect Donald Trump's former attorneys and one of his former aides have been criminally charged in Wisconsin as part of the "fake electors" plot from 2020.

According to the Guardian, attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and James Troupis, along with Republican operative Michael Roman, have all been charged by Wisconsin's Justice Department with conspiracy to commit a crime and several additional counts of fraud. While Wisconsin has previously pursued civil action as part of the fake electors scheme, this marks the first time the Badger State has filed criminal charges in response to the plot to overturn the 2020 election in the critical battleground state.

The criminal complaint mentioned Chesebro as the brains of the operation, having authored a memo entitled: "The Real Deadline for Settling a State’s Electoral Votes." That memo laid out the plan for Republicans to falsely submit their names to seven different swing states as the duly appointed presidential electors, even though President Joe Biden actually won the election in those states.

Chesebro's new charges are particularly noteworthy, as CNN reported in 2023 that Chesebro was cooperating with the fake elector investigations in both Michigan and Wisconsin. He also cooperated with law enforcement in both Arizona and Nevada, and pleaded guilty after Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis indicted him and more than a dozen others in her RICO case. His plea of conspiracy to commit to filing false documents guaranteed no prison time provided he cooperated with Willis' office and testified against his co-defendants.

Andrew Hitt, who was the chair of the Wisconsin Republican Party in 2020, told 60 Minutes earlier this year that he felt pressured to go along with the fake elector plot out of fear of Trump's supporters. And in a 2022 deposition, Hitt said he regularly got threatening calls and emails from both sides of the political aisle, with some demanding to know his exact location.

"If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death," Hitt told journalist Anderson Cooper. "It was not a safe time."

Attorney Scott Grubmann, who represents Chesebro, insistes that his client "never believed" that Trump won the 2020 election despite his role in hatching the fake elector plot.

READ MORE:[Former Trump lawyer and Ga co-defendant now cooperating in 2 new 'fake elector' investigations

Click here to read the Guardian's report in fulL.

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an 11 24

four years after losing the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden, Donald Trump continues to claim that the election was stolen from him — a false claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

In 2024, Marc Elias and other Democratic lawyers fear that if Trump loses to Vice President Kamala Harris, he will try to overturn the election results.

According to Politico reporters Liz Crampton and Kyle Cheney, "Many of the people preparing to cast votes for Donald Trump in the Electoral College in 2024 were involved in his plot to subvert the election in 2020."

"Of the 93 Republicans designated as prospective presidential electors for Trump from the seven battleground states," Crampton and Cheney explain in an article published on November 4, "eight are facing felony charges for signing false Electoral College certificates in 2020, according to a Politico analysis. Another five signed similar certificates in 2020 but were not charged. And at least six others played notable roles in challenging the results of the 2020 election or promoting election conspiracy theories."

The reporters add, "All told, at least 1 in 5 prospective Trump electors from battleground states this year had some connection to the scheme to overturn the 2020 election."

The fact some of these "prospective presidential electors for Trump," Crampton and Cheney note, hasn't hurt their standing in the Republican Party.

"Rather than being punished or shunted aside for their role in an attempt to overturn a democratic election," the journalists observe, "they've been elevated. The GOP has rewarded those accused of felony crimes with a return to the coveted position they stand accused of abusing four years ago."

*Read Politico's full article at this link.

---

===

Fourteen so-called fake electors who participated in former President Donald Trump’s 2020 scheme to throw the election results into chaos will once again serve as electors for Trump in 2024, including several who currently face criminal charges.

With input from the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, Republican state parties in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada have renominated 14 of the 84 fake electors from the 2020 election. Wisconsin's electors aren't publicly available until the first week of October, according to state election officials. A legal settlement bars unauthorized Wisconsin 2020 electors from serving as electors for Trump again.

There are no repeat electors from 2020 on this year’s Republican slates for Arizona and Georgia, the other two states where fake electors signed certificates incorrectly declaring Trump the winner.

The 14 former fake electors who are serving again include the Nevada Republican Party chairman, the Republican National Committeeman from Pennsylvania and several current or former county chairs.

usatoday

"Politically or in terms of the health of our democracy, the idea that people who potentially committed a crime in trying to further a scheme to subvert the results of the 2020 election... the idea that they are in any way involved in politics is troubling," Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law Rick Hasen said.

While some may have acted with the belief that they were just a back up if there was a legal change to the outcome, Hasen noted, "some of them, there have at least been allegations that they knew what they were doing and they knowingly engaged in criminal conduct."

None of the 14 repeat electors responded to USA TODAY's attempts to contact them.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump is facing four felony charges in Washington, D.C. related to leading conspiracies to reverse the 2020 results and disenfranchise millions of voters. He has refused to commit to unconditionally accepting the results of the upcoming 2024 election, and while he has sometimes acknowledged that he lost the 2020 race, he has also continued to falsely tell supporters that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

Pending charges

Charges have been brought against the fake electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada, as well as some people working with Trump.

Some of the cases are moving very slowly. In August, a Maricopa County judge set a tentative trial date of Jan. 5, 2026, for Arizona's fake electors case. The state GOP did not renominate any of the 2020 electors. In Nevada, the state has appealed to the state supreme court a lower court decision to reject the fake electors case stating it had been filed in the wrong county.

More:‘Somewhat dicey' and ‘problematic’: Inside Trump's bid to have fake electors overturn 2020 election

Still, electors might think twice about being party to signing such certificates again, Hasen said.

"Anyone who's an elector who's asked to do something shady this time, might think, hmm, last time around, these people were indicted, so maybe I shouldn't do that," Hasen said.

Michigan

The Michigan Republican Party has renominated the most fake electors. Six names that appeared on a certificate falsely claiming that Trump had won the state are on the 2024 list of 15 electors provided by the Michigan Secretary of State's office: Amy Facchinello, John Haggard, Timothy King, Marian Sheridan, Hank Choate and Meshawn Maddock–a former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party.

Trump lost Michigan in 2020 by about 154,000 votes.

All six of them face criminal charges. The trial has not yet been scheduled but isn't expected to begin this year.

Choate's attorney, David Kallman, said the pending 2020 charges shouldn't affect who is picked to be a 2024 elector. Choate has pleaded not guilty.

"This was another election year. This really has nothing to do with the last 2020, election," he said. "I don't think it really impacts the criminal case at all."

Kallman said that Choate didn't know he was doing anything wrong in 2020. He said Trump's attorney's told the electors that the certificate would only be used if Trump's campaign won a court case overturning the results of the election in Michigan or if the state legislature stepped in.

"My client was told by people he trusted, attorneys at this meeting, that this wasn't going to be used unless one of those things happened," Kallman said.

He said electors were only presented with the page to sign their names, not the page that falsely claimed that they voted in the Capitol building and that Trump won.

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Republicans submitted a list of presidential electors to the secretary of state’s office with five former fake electors: Bill Bachenberg, Bernadette Comfort, Ash Khare, Pat Poprik and Andy Reilly. The state has 19 electoral votes. Trump lost in 2020 by about 80,000 votes.

Reilly, an attorney, is also the Republican National Committeeman from Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania electors wouldn't sign the fake certificate in 2020 unless the forms specifically said that their votes weren't to be counted until the courts ruled in Trump's favor. Therefore, electors have not been charged with a crime.

Khare, who has been an elector since 1990, told USA TODAY in April that he advocated to include that clause.

"We wanted to make sure that we’re not doing anything illegal," he said.

Nevada

The Nevada Republican Party renominated Michael McDonald, the chair of the state party, and Jesse Law, chairman of the Republican party of Clark County, both of whom signed the 2020 certificate although Trump lost the state by 154,000 votes. The state has six electoral votes.

McDonald, a longtime friend of Trump's who is senior adviser to the 2024 Trump campaign, and Law were among the electors indicted in Nevada. The case, which was dismissed over questions of whether it was filed in the correct county, has been appealed by Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, to the state Supreme Court.

Trump lost Nevada by more than 30,000 votes.

New Mexico

The New Mexico Republican Party renominated Deborah Weh Maestas, the former state party chair. The state has five electoral votes. It's role in the scheme was always considered an outlier. New Mexico is not a swing state and has supported Democrats in every presidential election since 2008. Trump lost there in 2020 but about 100,000 votes.

Like in Pennsylvania, the 2020 New Mexico electors wouldn't sign unless the forms specifically said that their votes weren't to be counted until the courts ruled in Trump's favor. New Mexico electors have not been charged with a crime.

More:Wisconsin is the last state that may prosecute Trump’s fake electors, but AG Josh Kaul is mum

A key legal change since 2020

Electors normally draw little to no attention. In a presidential election year, each party nominates state electors who will vote for their presidential nominee in the Electoral College if their candidate wins. Party leaders such as the county party chairs or local elected officials are normally selected. Their names must be submitted to the state before the election and made publicly available.

But in 2020 GOP officials in seven states that President Joe Biden won sent fake electoral certificates to Congress stating that former President Donald Trump had actually won. The certificates were an effort to baselessly convince lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence that there were substantial questions about the outcome of the election in swing states.

The House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and Trump's efforts to stay in power after losing the election found that the fake electoral certificates were part of a coordinated effort by Trump's allies to block Congress from certifying the election results. They wanted Congress to return th

Pence refused to accept, or even consider, the "alternate" electoral slates.

Jonathan Diaz, Director of Voting Advocacy for advocacy group Campaign Legal Center, said it is unlikely that scheme would be successful again. In 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which changed the rules so Congress can only count electoral certificates signed by the governor of the state or another official approved by state law when the House and Senate meet to count the votes on Jan. 6. It also raised the threshold for members of Congress to object to counting a state from one representative and one senator to one-fifth of each chamber. Also, in 2023 the Supreme Court ruled in Moore v. Harper that state legislatures have little power to overturn election results.

"It's really going to be much, much more difficult for a slate of fake electors to try the same kind of shenanigans that they did in 2020," Diaz said. "The [2022 law] was really targeted at plugging the holes that existed in the previous process, because the law was so old, and really making sure that the kind of effort that we saw focused on that joint session of Congress can't occur again."

*USA TODAY reporter Erin Mansfield contributed to this article

===

an 6 24

alternet-no lnx

Why this Trump ally is 'most important person charged' in Wisconsin scheme: legal expert

Maya BoddieJune 04, 2024

Attorney Kenneth Chesebro was one of three former President Donald Trump allies charged by the state of Wisconsin Tuesday in connection to the 2020 fake elector's scheme led by the ex-president's campaign in efforts to overturn the election.

The fake elector ploy architect was indicted alongside Wisconsin lawyer James Troupis and former Trump campaign official Michael Roman — each on one count of forgery. CBS News reports, "The three are set to make their initial appearances in Dane County Circuit Court on Sept. 19, court records show. The charge carries a sentence of up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000."

MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin explained to host Katy Tur how the Wisconsin charges differ from 2020 election fake elector charges in Georgia and Arizona, and why Chesebro is the "most important person charged in this document today."

READ MORE:Kenneth Chesebro among Trump allies hit with new fake elector indictments in Wisconsin

Rubin explained, "There are five suits now with respect to these fake elector schemes. Ken Chesebro is charged only in two of them. He was charged in Georgia, where he pled guilty and, now today, he's charged in Wisconsin. I want to tell you what makes this different, because Ken Chesebro's involvement in Wisconsin is qualitatively different. First of all, Wisconsin is where it all began. This is the state for which he wrote the original memo about fake electors in early December of 2020."

The legal expert continued, "Secondly, he attended the meeting of fake electors in Wisconsin. He basically crashed it, even though he had no right to be there."

Tur asked, "Isn't the argument in Georgia that he never went to Georgia and he couldn't be involved in the conspiracy because he never stepped in the state?"

Rubin replied, "It may have been one of his arguments before he pled guilty, but now having pled guilty, whether or not he stepped into the state of Georgia is irrelevant."

READ MORE:Watch: Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro strikes last-minute plea deal with Georgia prosecutors

"But here, he was in Wisconsin?" Tur added.

Rubin emphasized, "But here he was in Wisconsin, definitely involved in the meeting itself, then with the Wisconsin documents don't reach Washington, DC, and aren't received by members of congress, the Wisconsin republican party has a part-time aide fly them out there, who is there to receive them from her? None other than Ken Chesebro. And finally, while he did conduct an interview with wisconsin investigators, they discovered that he lied to them about his Twitter account, something that Michigan investigators also discovered. So, unlike in other states where he is theoretically a cooperator and an unindicted co-conspirator, here, he's probably the most important person charged in this document today.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Why Kenneth Chesebro is 'most important person charged' in Wisconsin: legal expert

youtu.be

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Indictments over fake electors scheme in Arizona

The Trump campaign had a seven-state scheme to subvert the Electoral College process after he lost the 2020 election, and prosecutors in several states have pursued charges against fake electors.

CNN reported later Wednesday that a grand jury in Arizona had handed up an indictment against Trump’s allies over their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, including the fake electorsfrom that state and several individuals connected to his campaign.

Boris Epshteyn, a former White House aide who remains one of Trump’s closest advisers; Meadows; and Giuliani are among those who have been indicted, according to a source familiar with the investigation. CNN is reaching out to those charged for comment.

While Trump is not among those charged in Arizona, the details in the indictment suggest he is “Unindicted Coconspirator 1.”

State prosecutors in Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada have now charged at least some of the fake electors in their states. An investigation is still underway in Wisconsin. Prosecutors in New Mexico and Pennsylvania have declined to bring charges.

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republican attorneys settled a lawsuit in Wisconsin this week involving the creation of the fake electors plot between Kenneth Chesebro and a little-known lawyer called Jim Troupis, Wisconsin Public Radioreported.

The civil lawsuit was brought by the liberal firm Law Forward in conjunction with the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (I-CAP).

ICAP director Mary McCord, an MSNBC analyst and former Justice Department official, explained in her podcast with co-host and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann that Troupis began talking with Chesebro as early as Nov. 8, 2020 to hatch a scheme to create and submit fraudulent assertions that Trump had won the electoral college in Wisconsin.

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The idea was that they'd be passed to then-Vice President Mike Pence, who would count them instead of the authentic ones.

The fake electors then met on Dec. 14, submitting their names and information as if they were actual representatives to the Electoral College.

ICAP's case was against the electors and the lawyers.

"Really, this was driven by Trump campaign lawyer, Jim Troupis, in Wisconsin," explained McCord.

The goal of the lawsuit was to have a court say unequivocally that what was done was "unlawful and a civil conspiracy," McCord continued.

Chesebro asked Troupis to write up the plot in a memo that could then be sent to the Trump campaign, the lawsuit stated. Troupis was then connected to Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Boris Epshteyn.

Thanks to the lawsuit, all of the documents, emails and text messages were made public.

Also read:Trump lawyers 'could face discipline' if they shrugged off Weisselberg lies

One of the key parts of the Trump allies' argument was the idea that the 12th Amendment doesn't clearly state how ballots should be counted, so the allies could gum up the works with the slates of fake electors being sent to then-Vice President Mike Pence.

The Wisconsin electors made their way to Washington, D.C., thanks to GOP staffer Alesha Guenther who flew them to the Capitol. They made their way to Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who has claimed he had no idea how the whole scheme unfolded.

The emails and text messages released say something else, however. According to a text to Chesebro from Troupis, the latter said that he spoke to Johnson "last night" on the phone about Pence, "just to take his temperature." He then explained the scheme to Johnson a full month prior to Jan. 6, 2021, the messages reveal.

"I was aware that we got this package and that somebody wanted us to deliver it, so we reached out," Johnson told CNN's Manu Raju on June 21, 2022.

When Raju asked who had given him the fake electors, he claimed, "I have no idea."

“I had no involvement in an alternate slate of electors. I had no idea this’d even be delivered to us, got delivered staff to staff. My chief of staff did the right thing. Contacted the vice president's staff. They said they didn't want it, so we didn't deliver it," he said at the time.

Johnson's aide, Sean Riley, told Pence's legislative director Chris Hodgson they had the list for Michigan and Wisconsin.

“Do not give that to him,” Hodgson replied.

Weissmann said on the podcast that the emails and text messages prove that Chesebro and Troupis they knew exactly what they were doing.

"It was a public nuisance because it had impacted the community in Wisconsin and their ability to actually have their votes count and that it violated another law ... where these electors took the position of real electors even though they weren't the real electors," McCord explained. "So, we used these civil causes of action, we were trying to get the court to say this is unlawful and to prevent them from ever doing it again."

"It's so important that these cases get to trial because everything that you have seen — and now a bit out there — that's the whole point of a trial for everyone to see," Weissmann said.

Listen to the full podcast here.

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Attorney Kenneth Chesebro, a co-defendant in Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' election interference/RICO case against former President Donald Trump, dodged a possible prison sentence when he reached a plea agreement with her office.

As part of the plea deal, Chesebro must fully cooperate with Willis' team — and that includes being forthcoming about his role in the fake electors scheme and efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's victory in Georgia.

But Georgia wasn't the only state where Chesebro wanted Trump to receive electoral votes that Biden won.

On March 5, the Associated Press reported that as part of a civil lawsuit settlement in Wisconsin, Chesebro and former judge Jim Troupis "turned over more than 1400 pages of documents, e-mails and text messages, along with photos and video, offering a detailed account of the scheme's origins in Wisconsin."

In an opinion column published the following day, MSNBC's Hayes Brown points to this settlement as a troubling illustration of how dangerous the fake electors scheme was.

"Wisconsin was one of several key swing states, including Michigan and Georgia, where Trump's allegations of fraud quickly ran into the reality of the courtroom," Brown explains. "But, as he would hash out in his messages with former judge Jim Troupis, Chesebro found it better to think of the lawsuits challenging Biden's win as a convenient pretext for a more novel, underhanded strategy."

Brown continues, "Ongoing litigation would leave the election’s outcome in question when the Electoral College was required to meet on December 8, 2020; Republican electors in several states where Trump lost would also cast their votes that day — a supposed precaution should the campaign's lawsuits eventually win out. But, as Chesebro suggested early on, those fraudulent votes would allow Republican-controlled state legislatures to demand Congress count the 'alternate slates,' rather than those cast for Biden."

The MSNBC journalist stresses that Chesebro's actions went way beyond being a mere political "stunt."

"A 'stunt' is meant for show," Brown writes. "It seems, though, that the Trump campaign was hoping its plan would be consequential; in other words, it lacked the presumption of failure…. Even once the Supreme Court made it clear that it wouldn't step in to save Trump's doomed legal challenges, it wasn't the end of Chesebro's scheme."

Brown continues, "Instead, it simply merged with that of lawyer John Eastman, who argued in his own set of memos that Vice President Mike Pence should use the alternate slates that Chesebro had fostered to either throw the election for Trump or kick the matter back to GOP-controlled state legislatures."

*Read Hayes Brown's full MSNBC op-ed at this link.

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Prosecution in Michigan fake elector case points to nationwide effort to keep Trump in office

Anna Liz Nichols, Michigan Advance

February 15, 2024

James Renner testified Wednesday that he never believed he and 15 other individuals who signed documents claiming to be Michigan’s state electors with fake electoral votes in 2020 engaged in any illegal activity.

Renner, 77, was charged alongside 15 others by the Michigan Attorney General’s Office with several felonies, accused of fraudulently submitting fake electoral votes for former President Donald Trump to the U.S. Senate and National Archives. However, Renner had his charges dropped in October as part of a cooperation agreement with the Attorney General’s Office, for which he offered testimony in a Lansing court Wednesday.

“The individuals … were all conscientious individuals,” Renner said, clarifying that he never intended any illegal action saying, “We were told this was an appropriate process.”

The 15 individuals facing charges are split into two groups for court proceedings, the Wednesday group includes two high-profile leaders in the Republican Party: Michigan GOP National Committeewoman Kathleen Berden and former Michigan GOP Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock. Other defendants in this group are Mari-Ann Henry, John Haggard, Amy Facchinello and Michele Lundgren.

Renner didn’t clarify who told the group that they were engaging in normal lawful behavior at the Dec. 14, 2020, meeting where the individuals charged met up at the Michigan Republican Party headquarters in Lansing. At this meeting, they signed documents saying they, as the rightful electors of Michigan cast the state’s electoral votes for former President Donald Trump. However, lawyers for the defense have argued that potentially individuals didn’t know what they were signing, defeating the intent to commit fraud.

Because President Joe Biden had won Michigan by more than 154,000 votes, the Democratic panel of electors were the rightful group to submit the state’s electoral votes. But conspiracies over election fraud, spearheaded by Trump, led many in the state of Michigan to question and deny the integrity of the 2020 election.

Renner testified that he was told that should the election be overturned and Trump be determined to have won the 2020 presidential election, the paperwork he signed would ensure that the appropriate partisan electors would be counted and Michigan could submit its votes for Trump.

There was zero talk, to his knowledge, on Dec. 14, 2020, at the meeting where the documents were signed that the group was attempting anything illegal or attempting to defraud peoples’ votes, Renner said. If there was, he would have left due to his beliefs as a retired member of law enforcement.

Renner said seven years in law enforcement, including time with the Michigan State Police providing security for the Michigan State Capitol, instilled him with a respect for the law.

“It’s the foundation of this country,” Renner said.

Maddock’s lawyer, Nicholas Somberg, referenced a group photo members of the group took on the same day in Lansing asking Renner if in his experience in enforcement if individuals engaging in criminal activity typically take group photos as crimes are being committed, to the laughter of defendants and the judge. The photo was taken the day Renner and others in a group approached the Michigan State Capitol building to submit false electoral votes while the building was closed due to threats of violence.

Renner said the group had been told that if they presented their documents as the Republican electors, lawmakers had the ability to accept their slate.

Garett Koger, a lawyer on Berden’s defense, said the state’s case will ultimately fail to show any criminal action by members of the charged group, adding that the documents were part of a “larger plan that originated” with Kenneth Chesebro.

Chesebro, former attorney for Trump, pleaded guilty in Fulton County, Ga., Superior Court in October to a felony charge after he admitted to orchestrating a multi-state fake elector plot to present fake elector documents in favor of a Trump presidency.

Although Chesebro pleaded guilty to a crime for his role in the plot, Koger said Chesebro’s testimony in Michigan later in the preliminary exam will show Chesebro had an understanding of a 1960 case out of Hawaii where there was a recount in the presidential election and both party’s electors submitted electoral votes pending the recount which did reverse Hawaii’s pick for president.

For Hawaii, the difference in votes between candidates was around 100 votes, Michigan’s was more than 150,000. The electors in Hawaii acted pending the result of an official statewide recount and there was no official statewide recount in Michigan.

The preliminary exams will continue in the coming weeks as the court schedules with the defense of the various defendants.

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in seven different states that Joe Biden won in the 2020 presidential election, MAGA Republicans hoping to keep Donald Trump in the White House circulated bogus certificates declaring Trump as the winner. One of those states was Michigan, where Democratic State Attorney General Dana Nessel has been aggressively going after Trump supporters she says were major players in the fake electors scheme in her state.

The Detroit News' Craig Mauger reports that on Thursday, December 14, "top Michigan Republicans" who testified in court linked the organization and execution of a false certificate saying Donald Trump won the state's 2020 presidential election directly to Trump's campaign."

"While the Trump campaign has previously been tied to the overall strategy of crafting electoral certificates in seven battleground states," Mauger explains, "the testimony Thursday described campaign staffers as being involved in recruiting attendees and running the meeting of the false electors in Lansing on December 14, 2020. During that gathering, 16 Republican activists signed a document that was used to claim the then-incumbent Republican president won Michigan's 16 electoral votes."

One of the witnesses who testified, according to Mauger, was former Michigan Republican Party Communications Director Tony Zammit.

According to Zammit's testimony, Shawn Flynn (an attorney for Trump's 2020 campaign in Michigan) gaveled in that December 14, 2020 meeting.

Mauger reports, "Zammit's remarks could be key because prosecutors must eventually prove the Republicans who signed the false electoral certificate had an 'intent to defraud,' a standard that could be more difficult to reach if lawyers working for Trump were indeed directing the Michigan Republicans to take the actions they did or if the Republican activists didn't understand what they were signing…. Zammit also testified that Flynn had been directed to submit the false certificate to the federal government."

Former Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land testified as well.

According to Mauger, Land "said because the Board of State Canvassers determined Democrat Joe Biden won Michigan's election, she didn't understand why the GOP electors were meeting — and no one detailed to her why the event was necessary."

Land testified, "I didn't have the information to make a decision."

:{*:{Read the Detroit News' full report at this link.}:

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in leaked recordings from conversations with prosecutors in Michigan, former Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro explained how he sold former President Donald Trump false hope about overturning the 2020 presidential election.

CNN published the audio on Wednesday. Chesebro can be heard talking about an Oval Office photo op with then-lame duck President Trump. During his interactions with Trump, Chesebro apparently defied instructions from fellow attorney Jim Troupis — who tried and failed to challenge election results in the battleground state of Wisconsin — to not say anything to the outgoing president to get his hopes up about overturning the election.

"I ended up explaining that Arizona was still hypothetically possible — because the alternate electors had voted," Chesebro said in one of the recordings. "Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg and [Harvard law professor emeritus] Laurence Tribe had both written that January 6 was the real deadline."

"So it was, I think clear in a way that maybe it hadn't been before that we had until January 6 to win," Chesebro said, while clarifying his comments emphasizing the importance of the January 6 deadline.

According to CNN, Chesebro was chastised after his interaction with Trump by former White House Chief of Staff (and former Republican National Committee chairman) Reince Priebus, who was reportedly "visibly angry" following Chesebro's conversation.

"Right after that meeting, Troupis said Reince Priebus was extremely concerned with what I told the president about Arizona and about the real deadline being January 6, and that he was going to do damage control," Chesebro is heard saying. "Reince was going to follow up and was going to try to mitigate whatever optimism I had created."

Chesebro, along with other Trump attorneys like John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark, was a primary architect of the so-called "fake electors" plot. That plot involved GOP activists from swing states Joe Biden narrowly won presenting themselves as members of that state's electoral college, whereupon they would cast their electoral votes for Donald Trump in defiance of their state's voters.

After entering his guilty plea in Fulton County District Court in Georgia in late October, Chesebro has since cooperated with investigators in four other states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. While cooperation won't guarantee that Chesebro avoids jail time altogether, it could result in lesser sentences.

To listen to the recordings, scroll up or click this link.

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Many voters who served as fake electors in support of ex-President Donald Trump during the 2020 election are adamantly rejecting the idea of helping the MAGA hopeful again next year.

"How do you convey laughter in a newspaper article?" former Wisconsin Republican Party chairman and GOP elector Andrew Hitt said to The Washington Post. "No, I will not be serving as an elector again."

Hitt's comments come as ten Wisconsin GOPers earlier this week, according to ABC News, "settled a civil lawsuit and admitted their actions were part of an effort to overturn President Joe Biden's victory."

Additionally this week, former Trump attorney and Georgia election case co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro — "who was one of the architects of the 'fake elector' scheme that attempted to overturn the 2020 election in multiple swing states — "is now assisting state attorneys general in both Michigan and Wisconsin's fake elector investigation," CNN reports.

"Knowing what I know now? No," Republican Party activist and Ken Carroll told the Post in response to whether he'd serve as a fake elector again. "But hindsight provides a wealth of knowledge we don't have at the time of an event."

Noting that "Carroll was one of 84 Republican presidential electors who convened to cast votes for Trump in 2020 across seven states where Joe Biden had been declared the certified winner," the Post reports, "In the past few months, 25 of those 84 electors have been charged with felonies, such as forgery, false statements and filing false documents."

The Post notes:

*Another force will make it harder for electors to do what Trump’s slates did in 2020: The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, bipartisan legislation intended to prevent the chaos surrounding the events of the last presidential election.

*Among other provisions, the new law empowers a state executive, typically the governor, to determine which slate of electors — Republican or Democratic — will be counted during the joint session of Congress. No other entity or individual is given the power to do so, and Congress is required to accept that determination, absent a court ruling.

"I think the message being sent on a state-by-state basis, without necessarily any coordination and without the overarching reach of a federal prosecution is: don't mess around with the integrity of state election proceedings," ex-US attorney Carol Lam told the Post.

Still, Atlanta, Georgia GOP consultant Brian Robinson said, "The party will find no shortage of volunteers for the job," but some might hesitate. He added, "With the precedent now set by the district attorney, electors of both parties might get a little nervous if it's once again a razor-thin margin, which is quite possible."

Hitt, who no longer supports Trump, the Post notes "has been cooperating with federal special counsel Jack Smith's investigation since May 2022, said Trump won't have any problem finding people who will serve as electors next year if he wins the party's nomination."

He said, "There will be activists who will do it, no doubt about it. They're not going to have a hard time because they still have people who will do anything for the guy.

*The Washington Post's full report is here (subscription required).

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The 10 fake electors from Wisconsin disavowed their attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, recognized the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s victory, and pledged not to serve as real electors in 2024 or any election when Trump is on the ballot, or to act as sham electors in any future election, as part of a civil lawsuit settlement announced on Wednesday.

This is the latest measure of accountability for the Trump campaign’s seven-state plot to undermine the Electoral College and block the transfer of power. Federal prosecutors indicted Trump in connection with the scheme; the entire faux delegation from Michigan was hit with state charges; and so have three of the 16 fake electors from Georgia.

As part of the Wisconsin settlement, the 10 fake electors issued a statement acknowledging that the phony certificates they signed in December 2020 were “used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn” the lawful election results.

“We hereby reaffirm that Joseph R. Biden, Jr. won the 2020 presidential election and that we were not the duly elected presidential electors for the State of Wisconsin for the 2020 presidential election,” says a portion of their statement. “We oppose any attempt to undermine the public’s faith in the ultimate results of the 2020 presidential election.”

The agreement also requires the 10 GOP activists to provide “full cooperation” with any “ongoing or future” Justice Department probes related to the 2020 presidential election. Special counsel Jack Smith, who has investigated the 2020 election subversion, indicted Trump and interviewed some fake electors, but hasn’t charged any of them.

Wisconsin’s delegation of sham electors was led by Andrew Hitt, the state GOP chair at the time, and included Robert Spindell, now a member of the Wisconsin Election Commission. They both were part of Wednesday’s settlement.

The civil case is unrelated to any potential state criminal inquiry into the electors plot.

Two liberal-leaning groups filed the case: Wisconsin-based Law Forward and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, at Georgetown University. The groups said the deal penalized people who “ignore our nation’s democratic ideals” and “helps ensure that a similar effort to subvert our democracy will never happen again.”

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CNN —

The civil case is unrelated to any potential state criminal inquiry into the electors plot.

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CNN —

The civil case is unrelated to any potential state criminal inquiry into the electors plot.

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ddd ecember 2020, six Nevada Republicans made efforts to overturn the presidential election results in the state.

According to an exclusive Politico report, the group of "Republican activists and operatives," at ex-President Donald Trump's request, "signed fake certificates on Dec. 14, 2020, falsely declaring themselves to be the state's duly appointed Electoral College representatives."

The state's Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford has been "quietly" probing the efforts of Nevada GOP chair Michael McDonald, Jim DeGraffenreid, "Jesse Law, the head of the Clark County Republican Party; Durward James Hindle III; Eileen Rice; and Shawn Meehan," Politico reports.

Per the report, recently, "Investigators have questioned witnesses about the attempts of the so-called alternate electors to present themselves as viable representatives of the states' voters, according to three people familiar with the probe. Investigators have also asked about documents those people prepared as part of the effort."

Politico notes DeGraffenreid "was in touch with Kenneth Chesebro — a lawyer working with the Trump campaign and a chief architect of the fake elector scheme — in the days before the activists signed the fake certificates, according to the House Jan. 6 select committee report."

Chesebro was indicted alongside Trump and 17 others by a Fulton Country grand jury in August on criminal charges related to their plan to overturn the election.

According to Politico, the attorney general "has previously sent mixed messages about the potential for a state investigation into the false electors' actions," suggesting in May thatcpiminal charges were unlikely.

"As you all know, I have been silent on Nevada's fake electors, except to say that the matter was on our radar," he said days later during a June testimony to the Nevada state legislature. "With it on our radar, we ascertained that current state statutes did not directly address the conduct in question — to the dismay of some, and I’m sure, to the delight of others."

However, Politico reports Ford then said during a September interview, "I've never said that we're not going to prosecute. It is not that I've said that I can do nothing. What I have said, and I've been precise with my wording on purpose, is we don't have statutes in this state that directly address the issue."

Politico report is herean 11 23

iiin December 2020, six Nevada Republicans made efforts to overturn the presidential election results in the state.

Chesebro was indicted alongside Trump and 17 others by a Fulton Country grand jury in August on criminal charges related to their plan to overturn the election.

Politico report is here.an 11 23

iiin December 2020, six Nevada Republicans made efforts to overturn the presidential election results in the state.

Chesebro was indicted alongside Trump and 17 others by a Fulton Country grand jury in August on criminal charges related to their plan to overturn the election.

Politico report is here.

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https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4138124-trumps-fake-electors-7-states-he-lost/

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What’s happening with Trump’s ‘fake electors’ in 7 states he lost

BY NICK ROBERTSON - 08/04/23

Former President Trump was arraigned Thursday on four charges alleging that he attempted to orchestrate a scheme of fraudulent electoral college votes to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — so-called “fake electors” signed paperwork attempting to cast electoral college ballots for Trump instead of their states’ actual winner, President Biden.

The groups hoped that former Vice President Pence would count the fake electors’ certifications instead of the legitimate ones when the electoral college vote was certified on Jan. 6, 2021, changing the result of the election, the indictment alleged. None were successful.

Here’s what each state is, and isn’t, doing to investigate and prosecute them.

Arizona

A group of 22 Arizona Republicans, including the Republican Party chair and multiple state legislature members, signed papers intending to cast false electoral college votes in December 2020. That paperwork is now the focus of both a federal and state investigation.

State Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) ratcheted up her investigation into the group in July, requesting records from involved figures. The investigation is in its early stages.

Figures surrounding the case also received federal subpoenas for information and communication, according to local media.

Georgia

On the day that Georgia certified its electoral results in favor of Biden, 16 Republicans — led by the state’s Republican Party chair — allegedly met in a secret meeting in the state capitol to discuss plans to send an alternate slate of votes to Washington. The group also signed paperwork making their plans official.

The scheme is central to prosecutor Fani Willis’ (D) state probe into attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which may result in an additional indictment for Trump.

At least eight of the fake electors have signed immunity deals with Willis’ office, offering to cooperate in exchange for not being prosecuted.

Right-wing media supported the fake electors scheme and presented it as a legitimate “remedy” for Trump’s 2020 loss

Right after Election Day and two days before the 2020 election was called in Biden’s favor, Fox host Sean Hannity:{ suggested on his radio show that “the remedy” to a Trump loss would be state electors going against the popular vote. Hannity said that to his “understanding,” electors are “not required to vote in accordance with whatever the state popular vote is, if they think there is fraud that is taking place they do have the power to stop that in these states.” Premiere Radio, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:The Sean Hannity Show:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[11/05/20:{]}:
Mark Levin appealed directly to state lawmakers, tweeting on November 5, 2020, “Reminder to the Republican state legislatures, you have the final say over the choosing of electors, not any board of elections, secretary of state, governor, or even court.” (He would later claim:{ in a November 12, 2020, tweet, “Again and again, I have to explain that I never said electors should be chosen by the legislatures.”) Twitter, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[11/05/20:{]}:
Writing for The Blaze on November 5, 2020, Daniel Horowitz stated that “state legislatures can have their revenge :{and have the final say” in the 2020 election. Horowitz also echoed Levin’s support of the scheme, adding, “Mark Levin reminded his audience today that state legislatures are the ones who choose the electors who directly vote for president in each state.” The Blaze, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[11/05/20:{]}:
In a November 21, 2020, tweet, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton claimed that a Pennsylvania court decision:{ against the Trump campaign was a “miscarriage of justice and nakedly political.” Fitton also claimed that “under the Constitution, it is ultimately up [to] the Pennsylvania legislature to protect election integrity and appoint a clean slate of electors.” Twitter, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[11/21/20:{]}:
Christina Bobb :{argued on the December 14, 2020 episode of her OAN show that by “having the GOP electors cast their votes in these states, it preserves the legal remedy should Donald Trump win, either in court or in a state legislature, in the future.” She also defended the use of alternate electors because of the supposed “possibility that this state could flip or turn because there’s enough election fraud in here that it’s still contested.” OAN, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[12/14/20:{]}:
On the same day, OAN reporter Pearson Sharp showed a misleading video of Trump’s fake electors being denied entry to the Michigan Capitol, which he said was evidence that “official state electors are being barred from performing their constitutional duties.:{” Sharp claimed that “that video is all you need to see to understand the lengths being taken to undermine the election.” OAN, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[12/14/20:{]}:
Former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs legitimized the efforts of the fake electors on the December 14, 2020, episode of Lou Dobbs Tonight:{. Dobbs uncritically reported that “Republican electors in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia [are] meeting separately today to cast their own votes for President Trump — a procedural move that keeps all of President Trump's legal options open.” Fox Business, Lou Dobbs Tonight, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[12/14/20:{]}:
Speaking with Bobb on December 15, 2020, former Arizona state Sen. Kelly Townsend:{ claimed on OAN that the scheme was “absolutely legal and it’s not unprecedented.” Townsend would go on to defend the scheme further, claiming, “So it’s not treason. Some people are saying, ‘Oh, it’s treasonous, it’s seditious.’ It’s not any of that, it’s constitutional.” OAN, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[12/15/20:{]}:
On the July 31, 2022, edition of Fox News’ Life, Liberty, and Levin, host Mark Levin :{passionately defendedTrump's fake electors scheme, arguing that ,“you might think it's weird, you might think it's unethical, but it's not a crime.” Fox News, Life, Liberty, and Levin,:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[7/31/22:{]}:

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'Under close scrutiny': DOJ investigators zero in on ex-Trump lawyer Eastman over fake electors scheme

Alex HendersonJuly 04, 2023

Although special counsel Jack Smith has been conducting two federal criminal investigations of former President Donald Trump, only one of them has resulted in an indictment so far. At this point, Smith's probe of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results is strictly an investigation — not a prosecution, although former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr has predicted that Smith will probably "pull the trigger" and prosecute that case as well.

In an article published by The Guardian on July 4, journalist Peter Stone reports that Smith's team has been zeroing on former Trump attorney John C. Eastman's post-election activities. Eastman, a major player in the Claremont Institute (a right-wing think tank that has taken a very MAGA turn in recent years), was the author of an infamous late 2020 memo that described a game plan for overturning the election results.

"John Eastman, who was in the vanguard of lawyers plotting schemes involving 'fake electors' and other ploys to help Donald Trump thwart Joe Biden's win in 2020, is now under close scrutiny in federal and state investigations of Trump's drives to stay in power — and faces possible disbarment in California, say former prosecutors," Stone reports. "The former California law professor is one of several lawyers whose legal stratagems have been heavily examined by special counsel Jack Smith's accelerating investigation into Trump and his allies' efforts to block Biden from taking office."

READ MORE: Why disbarment could be the least of MAGA lawyer John Eastman's problems

The state investigation that Stone is referring to is being conducted by Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis.

Former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig told The Guardian that "it will be surprising" if "neither" Smith's investigation nor Willis' "ends in a criminal charge against Eastman as well, possibly, as other lawyers and Trump himself."

Columbia University law professor Dan Richman, a former prosecutor, told The Guardian, "By obtaining testimony from fake electors, Smith may be better able to nail down what information and advice passed between these soldiers in the larger scheme and those Trump lawyers who helped to concoct it. Testimony that, say, electors were advised to make false statements or given deliberately misleading advice would go far to showing a deliberate fraud by Trump's 'brain trust' of lawyers, including Eastman."

READ MORE: Fani Willis' latest moves strongly indicate a Trump indictment in Georgia is coming this summer

Read The Guardian's full report at this link.

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===

jack smith goes after nevada b/c GA covered, and dems n charge so no just in case defense?

---

mma 6 23

Individuals associated with Trump’s plot to appoint fake electors to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election have begun testifying before a federal grand jury. Last week, CNN reported:

Special counsel Jack Smith has compelled at least two Republican fake electors to testify to a federal grand jury in Washington in recent weeks by giving them limited immunity, part of a current push by federal prosecutors to swiftly nail down evidence in the sprawling criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The testimony, described to CNN by people familiar with the situation, comes after a year of relative dormancy around the fake electors portion of the investigation and as a parade of related witnesses are being told to appear before the grand jury with no chance for delay.

That activity could signal that investigators are nearing at least some charging decisions in a part of the 2020 election probe, sources added.

Right-wing media supported the fake electors scheme and presented it as a legitimate “remedy” for Trump’s 2020 loss

Right after Election Day and two days before the 2020 election was called in Biden’s favor, Fox host Sean Hannity suggested on his radio show that “the remedy” to a Trump loss would be state electors going against the popular vote. Hannity said that to his “understanding,” electors are “not required to vote in accordance with whatever the state popular vote is, if they think there is fraud that is taking place they do have the power to stop that in these states.” Premiere Radio, The Sean Hannity Show, [11/05/20]
Mark Levin appealed directly to state lawmakers, tweeting on November 5, 2020, “Reminder to the Republican state legislatures, you have the final say over the choosing of electors, not any board of elections, secretary of state, governor, or even court.” (He would later claim in a November 12, 2020, tweet, “Again and again, I have to explain that I never said electors should be chosen by the legislatures.”) Twitter, [11/05/20]
Writing for The Blaze on November 5, 2020, Daniel Horowitz stated that “state legislatures can have their revenge and have the final say” in the 2020 election. Horowitz also echoed Levin’s support of the scheme, adding, “Mark Levin reminded his audience today that state legislatures are the ones who choose the electors who directly vote for president in each state.” The Blaze, [11/05/20]
In a November 21, 2020, tweet, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton claimed that a Pennsylvania court decision against the Trump campaign was a “miscarriage of justice and nakedly political.” Fitton also claimed that “under the Constitution, it is ultimately up [to] the Pennsylvania legislature to protect election integrity and appoint a clean slate of electors.” Twitter, [11/21/20]
Christina Bobb argued on the December 14, 2020 episode of her OAN show that by “having the GOP electors cast their votes in these states, it preserves the legal remedy should Donald Trump win, either in court or in a state legislature, in the future.” She also defended the use of alternate electors because of the supposed “possibility that this state could flip or turn because there’s enough election fraud in here that it’s still contested.” OAN, [12/14/20]
On the same day, OAN reporter Pearson Sharp showed a misleading video of Trump’s fake electors being denied entry to the Michigan Capitol, which he said was evidence that “official state electors are being barred from performing their constitutional duties.” Sharp claimed that “that video is all you need to see to understand the lengths being taken to undermine the election.” OAN, [12/14/20]
Former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs legitimized the efforts of the fake electors on the December 14, 2020, episode of *Lou Dobbs Tonight. Dobbs uncritically reported that “Republican electors in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia [are] meeting separately today to cast their own votes for President Trump — a procedural move that keeps all of President Trump's legal options open.” Fox Business, Lou Dobbs Tonight, [12/14/20]*
Speaking with Bobb on December 15, 2020, former Arizona state Sen. Kelly Townsend claimed on OAN that the scheme was “absolutely legal and it’s not unprecedented.” Townsend would go on to defend the scheme further, claiming, “So it’s not treason. Some people are saying, ‘Oh, it’s treasonous, it’s seditious.’ It’s not any of that, it’s constitutional.” OAN, [12/15/20]
On the July 31, 2022, edition of Fox News’ Life, Liberty, and Levin, host Mark Levin passionately defendedTrump's fake electors scheme, arguing that ,“you might think it's weird, you might think it's unethical, but it's not a crime.” Fox News, Life, Liberty, and Levin,[7/31/22]

===

one has flipped thus atty COI? an 4 23

it was revealed today that there is an ongoing debate about removing a lawyer for some of the fake electors in the Georgia case. None of the fake electors have been charged with a crime. But it appears there is an ongoing fear that charges are coming from the grand jury and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Buried in the stories about the legal drama unfolding in Georgia was the revelation that one of those fake electors had made a deal with the prosecutors.

According to the New York Times report, "At least one of the electors not represented by Ms. [Kimberly B.] Debrow or Ms. [Holly] Pierson has an immunity deal in place and has cooperated with the prosecution, people with knowledge of the case have said."

It goes on to say that Willis' new motion asking for the removal of Debrow comes as others are desperately trying to get their own immunity deals.

"According to a legal analysis by the Brookings Institution, the fake electors could potentially face criminal liability for interfering with elections, among other charges," the report explained.

Local Atlanta station WXIA explained that the fake electors that once shared lawyers and were a united front, are now turning on each other.

Read the full report at the New York Times.

===

wow omg

3 23 yahoomail

Dear MoveOn member,

I'm Tony Evers, the governor of Wisconsin. I've never emailed you before, but I'm emailing you today because I need to talk to you about an incredibly urgent matter: the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on April 4 that will decide whether the far right controls the court or not.

My state is one of the most critical battleground states in the country, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court will rule on hugely consequential election cases that could end up deciding the 2024 presidential election.

That's why Republican billionaires are flooding Wisconsin with cash—all to elect their right-wing candidate, a radical extremist who collaborated with Trump's plot to undermine fair elections in Wisconsin.¹

Even the man who financed the January 6 insurrection is pouring money into our state.²

That's why I'm partnering with MoveOn to stop the far right and to win this election. But we need your help.

...

It's not just democracy and voting rights that are on the line in this election.

...

Sources:

*1. "Trump ally with ties to 'fake elector' scheme advances in Wisconsin Supreme Court race," NBC News, February 21, 2023

https://act.moveon.org/go/170624?t=4&akid=347354%2E20164584%2E_YYjVx*

no lnx

Trump ally with ties to 'fake elector' scheme advances in Wisconsin Supreme Court race

Daniel Kelly, a conservative with connections to a plan to reverse the 2020 election results, will face liberal Janet Protasiewicz in an April 4 election to determine control of the court.

Feb. 21, 2023,

By Adam Edelman

A Donald Trump ally who advised Republicans on legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race has advanced to the Wisconsin Supreme Court general election, putting him one step closer to a seat on the powerful bench.

Daniel Kelly is a former state Supreme Court justice with connections to a plan hatched by the former president's allies to reverse the 2020 election results in Wisconsin through the use of “fake electors.” He was one of two candidates to advance in Tuesday’s Supreme Court primary, according to projections by The Associated Press.

The other to move forward was liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County circuit judge who was endorsed by the Democratic abortion rights group Emily’s List.

Protasiewicz and Kelly will face off in an April 4 general election that will determine political control of the court — and, with it, the future of many pivotal issues the court is likely to decide in the coming years, including abortion rights, elections and gerrymandering. The winner is elected to a 10-year term.

Although the court and its members are technically nonpartisan, conservatives hold a 4-3 majority. But with conservative Justice Patience Roggensack retiring, that majority hangs in the balance.

There has not been a liberal majority on the court in 15 years, and Democrats see the election as a prime opportunity to shift the balance.

Kelly was one of two conservative candidates in the primary election; the other, Jennifer Dorow, is a Waukesha County circuit judge best known in the state for having presiding over the criminal trial of Darrell Brooks, who was convicted last year of killing six people at a Waukesha Christmas parade in 2021 when he crashed his SUV into the crowd.

Wisconsin faces high-stakes Supreme Court race

FEB. 21, 2023

Protasiewicz won about 46% of the vote Tuesday, a commanding victory based on Democratic turnout, particularly in Milwaukee and Dane counties, that was especially high for an off-year, down-ballot, winter primary election.

The two liberal candidates in the race together won 54% of the vote, compared to about 46% for the two conservative candidates combined.

Kelly only narrowly bested Dorow for a second-place finish, with the two basically splitting the support of voters who turned out for a conservative candidate. Kelly outperformed Dorow in rural counties, while Dorow outdid Kelly in the heavily Republican suburban counties surrounding Milwaukee.

Kelly is a former state Supreme Court justice who lost his seat in a 2020 election to liberal Jill Karofsky. He was appointed to the seat in 2016 by former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. He has remained tied to Trump allies through a plan that was intended to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state with the use of “fake electors.”

In a deposition to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, former Wisconsin GOP chairman Andrew Hitt said he and Kelly had “pretty extensive conversations” about the plan, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported last week that the Republican Party at the state and national levels had paid Kelly $120,000 to advise it on “election integrity” issues.

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A spokesperson for Kelly's campaign did not respond to questions about his involvement in those efforts. Kelly spokesperson Jim Dick told the Journal Sentinel that Kelly "believes Joe Biden is the duly elected president of the United States." Dick also suggested to the newspaper that Kelly's beliefs about the election were not necessarily aligned with what his clients believed, saying, "It is a maxim in the legal profession that the views of clients are not attributable to their attorneys."

Kelly based much of his campaign on heavy criticism of Protasiewicz for having openly suggested how she would rule on pivotal cases likely to come before the court involving hot-button issues with national ramifications, like abortion rights, elections and gerrymandering.

Protasiewicz, one of two liberal candidates in the race (the other was Everett Mitchell, a Dane County circuit judge), focused her campaign heavily on her support for abortion rights. Her television advertisements, for example, emphasized that support: One featured her talking directly to the camera, saying, “I believe in a woman’s freedom to make her own decision on abortion,” while a second featured several women touting that support and slamming “extremists” on the other side of the argument.

[pix Daniel Kelly, Scott Walker

Attorney Daniel Kelly in Madison, Wis., on July 22, 2016.John Hart / AP file]

The issue has taken center stage in the race. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, an 1849 state law banning abortion in almost all cases snapped back into effect.

Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul, both Democrats, have said they will not enforce the law, and Kaul has filed a lawsuit alleging that it is unenforceable. The suit is expected to eventually make its way before the state Supreme Court, most likely giving the court the power to decide on abortion rights in Wisconsin.

Kelly, who has refrained from saying how he would rule in such a case, was endorsed by three groups that oppose abortion rights.

The court is also very likely to hear various challenges to existing election laws, as well as cases that might relate to recounts, absentee ballots and other facets of election administration that could have material impacts on the outcomes of close elections in the perpetual battleground — including the 2024 presidential election.

For example, in a 4-3 decision last year, the state Supreme Court deemed all ballot drop boxes outside election clerks’ offices illegal — a setback for Democrats, who had advocated to preserve one of the more lenient rules about the boxes that arose during the coronavirus pandemic. Two years earlier, the court, in another 4-3 vote, narrowly upheld the 2020 election results in the state. Court watchers predict similar cases in the future.

Other issues that could make it before the court in the coming years include challenges to Act 10, a law enacted by then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker that eliminated collective bargaining for most public workers. It could also hear cases about redrawn legislative maps (the current map, which experts have said is one of the most gerrymandered in the country, was approved by the current state Supreme Court last year). As is the case in many states, in Wisconsin, if the governor and the Legislature cannot agree on legislative maps, the issue falls to the state Supreme Court.

The general election is on pace to be the most expensive Supreme Court race in Wisconsin history. Candidates and outside groups have already spent more than $9.2 million, an amount that, through the general election, will clearly exceed the record $10 million spent in 2020.

*2. "PAC linked to megadonor Dick Uihlein says it's prepared to spend millions backing Kelly for state Supreme Court," WISPolitics, November 18, 2022

https://act.moveon.org/go/170738?t=6&akid=347354%2E20164584%2E_YYjVx*

*3. "Work for anti-abortion group issue in Wisconsin court race," AP News, February 23, 2023

https://act.moveon.org/go/170739?t=8&akid=347354%2E20164584%2E_YYjVx*

===

2 23 sum update

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/how-the-fake-electors-scheme-explains-everything-about-trumps-attempt-to-steal-the-2020-election

===

see txt file for anno

*j6reptfake ch 3

FAKE ELECTORS AND THE “THE PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE STRATEGY”

On the morning of January 6th, in his speech at the Ellipse, President Trump exhorted his thousands of assembled supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol, explaining that “[w]e have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.” 1 This was no off-the-cuff remark; it was the culmination of a carefully planned scheme many weeks in the making. This plea by the President turned the truth on its head. There was only one legitimate slate of electors from the battleground States of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Trump wanted them rejected. This scheme involved lawyers, such as Kenneth Chesebro and Rudy Giuliani, as well as Mark Meadows. It also was aided at key points by Chairwoman of the Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel, Members of Congress, and Republican leaders across seven States—some of whom did not know exactly what they were being asked to do. President Trump oversaw it himself.

President Trump and his allies prepared their own fake slates of electoral college electors in seven States that President Trump lost: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And on December 14, 2020—the date when true, certified electors were meeting to cast their electoral votes for the candidate who had won the popular vote in each of those States—these fake electors also met, ostensibly casting electoral votes for President Trump, the candidate who had lost.

There was no legitimate reason for Trump electors to meet, vote, and produce fake slates on December 14th in States that former Vice President Biden won. Instead, this effort was aimed directly at the President of the Senate (which, under the Constitution, is the Vice President) in his role at the joint session of Congress on January 6th. President Trump and his advisors wanted Vice President Pence to disregard real electoral college votes for former Vice President Biden, in favor of these fake competing electoral slates.

But there never were real, competing slates of electors. By the time the fake Trump electors met on December 14th, appropriate government officials in each of the seven States had already certified their State’s official election results for former Vice President Biden. No court had issued an order reversing or calling into question those results, and most election-related litigation was over. And as detailed in Chapter 2, despite the illicit efforts of President Trump and his allies, no State legislature had agreed to the President’s request to reverse the result of the election by appointing a different slate of electors.

Given all of this, these groups of Trump backers who called themselves Presidential electors were never actually electors, and the votes they purported to cast on December 14th were not valid. They were fake. They had no legal standing, and their fake votes could not have been used by Vice President Pence to disregard the real votes of electors chosen by the voters.

By January 6th, President Trump had been discouraged by his top lawyers from following through on this plan. The Trump Campaign’s senior staff attorneys had concerns,2 and several days before the joint session, the Acting Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General blocked the sending of a letter indicating that there were “competing slates” of electors, including “in Georgia and several other States.” 3 But this reasoning did nothing to change President Trump’s rhetoric or plan. He continued to assert that there were “competing” or “dual” slates of electors to create an opportunity to stay in office on January 6th.4

These lawyers were right: President Trump’s plan was illegal. In his June 7, 2022, opinion, Federal District Judge David Carter wrote that this initiative to “certify alternate slates of electors for President Trump” constituted a “critical objective of the January 6 plan.” 5 This followed Judge Carter’s earlier determination in March that “[t]he illegality of the plan was obvious,” and “[e]very American—and certainly the President of the United States—knows that in a democracy, leaders are elected, not installed. With a plan this ‘BOLD,’ President Trump knowingly tried to subvert this fundamental principle. Based on the evidence the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.” 6

The fake elector effort was an unlawful, unprecedented and destructive break from the electoral college process that our country has used to select its President for generations.7 It led directly to the violence that occurred on January 6th. To address the damage that it caused, it is important to understand how it transpired.

3.1 Laying the Groundwork for the Fake Elector Plan: The Chesebro Memos

The fake elector plan emerged from a series of legal memoranda written by an outside legal advisor to the Trump Campaign: Kenneth Chesebro. Although John Eastman would have a more prominent role in advising President Trump in the days immediately before January 6th, Chesebro—an attorney based in Boston and New York recruited to assist the Trump Campaign as a volunteer legal advisor—was central to the creation of the plan.8 Memos by Chesebro on November 18th, December 9th, and December 13th, as discussed below, laid the plan’s foundation.

Chesebro’s first memo on November 18th suggested that the Trump Campaign could gain a few extra weeks for litigation to challenge Wisconsin’s election results, so long as a Wisconsin slate of Republican nominees to the electoral college met on December 14th to cast placeholder electoral college votes on a contingent basis.9 This memo acknowledged that “[i]t may seem odd that the electors pledged to Trump and Pence might meet and cast their votes on December 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count, and no certificate of election has been issued in favor of Trump and Pence.” 10 However, Chesebro argued that if such a slate of alternate electors gathered to cast electoral votes on a contingent basis, this would preserve the Trump Campaign’s options so “a court decision (or, perhaps, a state legislative determination) rendered after December 14 in favor of the Trump-Pence slate of electors should be timely.” 11

On December 9th, Chesebro penned a second memo, which suggested another purpose for fake electoral college votes on January 6th. It stated that unauthorized Trump electors in these States could be retroactively recognized “by a court, the state legislature, or Congress.” 12 Under this theory, there would be no need for a court to decide that the election had been decided in error; instead, Congress itself could choose among dueling slates of purported electoral votes—and thereby decide the Presidential election—even though Article II of the Constitution grants that power to the electoral college via the States.13

Chesebro’s contemporaneous communications make clear that the goal was having Congress act on the fake electoral votes. He emailed an organizer of the fake electors in Nevada that “the purpose of having the electoral votes sent in to Congress is to provide the opportunity to debate the election irregularities in Congress, and to keep alive the possibility that the votes could be flipped to Trump . . .” 14 And a legal advisor to the Arizona GOP reportedly described being told by Chesebro around this time that their supposed electors “would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted.” 15

Many of the States contested by the Trump team had laws that specified requirements for electors to validly cast and transmit their votes—and the December 9, 2020, memo recognized that some of these criteria would be difficult, if not impossible, for the fake electors to fulfill. (As described later, most were not fulfilled.) For example, Nevada State law required that the secretary of state preside when Presidential electors meet,16 and Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, had already signed a certificate ascertaining the Biden/Harris electors as the authorized, winning slate.17 Several States also had rules requiring electors to cast their votes in the State capitol building, or rules governing the process for approving substitutes if any original proposed electors from the November ballot were unavailable. As a result, Chesebro’s December 9, 2020, memo advised the Trump Campaign to abide by such rules, when possible, but also recognized that these slates could be “slightly problematic in Michigan,” “somewhat dicey in Georgia and Pennsylvania,” and “very problematic in Nevada.” 18

On December 13th, the fake elector scheme became even clearer in an email sent by Chesebro to Giuliani. His message was entitled “Brief notes on ‘President of the Senate’ strategy.” It addressed how the fake electors meeting the next day, December 14th, could be exploited during the joint session of Congress on January 6th by the President of the Senate—a role that the Constitution grants to the Vice President of the United States.19 Chesebro argued that, on January 6th, the President of the Senate could:

. . . firmly take the position that he, and he alone, is charged with the constitutional responsibility not just to open the votes, but to count them—including making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes . . .20

Chesebro’s email suggested that the President of the Senate (which, under the Constitution, is the Vice President) could toss out former Vice President Biden’s actual electoral votes for any State where the Trump Campaign organized fake electors, simply “because there are two slates of votes.” 21 Of course, there were never two slates of electoral votes, so this premise itself was fundamentally wrong. But he was arguing that even if votes by fake electors were never retroactively ratified under State law, their mere submission to Congress would be enough to allow the presiding officer to disregard valid votes for former Vice President Biden.22 Chesebro suggested this might result in a second term for President Trump, or, at minimum, it would force a debate about purported election fraud—neither of which was a lawful, legitimate reason to organize and convene fake electors.23

As discussed below and in Chapter 5, John Eastman worked with Chesebro as January 6th approached and wrote two additional memos that built upon, and extended, the plan to use the fake electoral votes during the joint session.24

3.2 President Trump and the Campaign Adopt the Fake Elector Scheme

In early December, the highest levels of the Trump Campaign took note of Chesebro’s fake elector plan and began to operationalize it. On December 6th, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows forwarded a copy of Chesebro’s November 18, 2020, memo to Trump Campaign Senior Advisor Jason Miller writing, “Let’s have a discussion about this tomorrow.” 25 Miller replied that he just engaged with reporters on the subject, to which Meadows wrote: “If you are on it then never mind the meeting. We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states.” 26 Miller clarified that he had only been “working the PR angle” and they should still meet, to which Meadows answered: “Got it.” 27 Later that week, Miller sent Meadows a spreadsheet that the Trump Campaign had compiled.28 It listed contact information for nearly all of the 79 GOP nominees to the electoral college on the November ballot for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.29 And on December 8th, Meadows received a text message from a former State legislator in Louisiana recommending that the proposed “Trump electors from AR [sic] MI GA PA WI NV all meet next Monday at their state capitols[,] [c]all themselves to order, elect officers, and cast their votes for the President. . . . Then they certify their votes and transmit that certificate to Washington.” 30 Meadows replied: “We are.” 31

Cassidy Hutchinson, a Special Assistant to the President and an assistant to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, confirmed Meadows’s significant involvement in the plan. Hutchinson told the Select Committee that Meadows followed the progress of the fake elector effort closely and that she “remember[ed] him frequently having calls, meetings, and outreach with individuals and this just being a prominent topic of discussion in our office.” When asked how many of his calls or meetings it came up in, she estimated “[d]ozens.” 32

The evidence indicates that by December 7th or 8th, President Trump had decided to pursue the fake elector plan and was driving it. Trump Campaign Associate General Counsel Joshua Findlay was tasked by the campaign’s general counsel, Matthew Morgan, around December 7th or 8th with exploring the feasibility of assembling unrecognized slates of Trump electors in a handful of the States that President Trump had lost.33 Findlay told the Select Committee “it was my understanding that the President made this decision. . . .” 34 As recounted by Findlay, Morgan conveyed that the client—President Trump—directed the campaign lawyers to “look into electors in these potential litigation States[.]” 35

President Trump personally called RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel days before December 14th to enlist the RNC’s assistance in the scheme.36 President Trump opened the call by introducing McDaniel to John Eastman, who described “the importance of the RNC helping the campaign to gather these contingent electors in case any of the legal challenges that were ongoing changed the results in any of the States.” 37 According to McDaniel, she called President Trump back soon after the call ended, letting him know that she agreed to his request and that some RNC staffers were already assisting.38

On December 13th and 14th, President Trump worked with Rudolph Giuliani on the plan’s implementation. On the 13th, Miller texted some of his colleagues to check in about the fake elector meetings scheduled for the following day. He let them know that Giuliani had told him “POTUS was aware” that they would be filing litigation in four States just “to keep the effort going”—which the Select Committee believes was to create a pretext to claim that it was still possible for the fake electors to be authorized retroactively.39 (In subsequent litigation, a Federal district court found that President Trump “filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the January 6th congressional proceedings through the courts.” 40) The next day, Miller sent an email asking whether they were going to issue a press release about electors, and he was told the “Mayor [is] going to discuss with POTUS.” 41

3.3 The Campaign Legal Team Bows Out, and Giuliani Steps In

[Rudy Giuliani speaks inside the Republican National Committee Headquarters in November about various lawsuits related to the 2020 election.]

Not everyone on the campaign was eager to pursue the fake elector plan. On December 11th, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a high-profile lawsuit filed by the State of Texas challenging the election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.42 After that decision, the Trump Campaign’s senior legal staffers said that they reduced their involvement in the fake elector effort, apparently because there was no longer a feasible scenario in which a court would determine that President Trump actually won any of the States he contested.43 Justin Clark, who oversaw the Trump Campaign’s general counsel’s office, said that he basically conveyed, “I’m out,” and encouraged his colleagues on the legal team to do the same.44 Findlay told the Select Committee that “we backed out of this thing,” and Morgan, his boss, said he had Findlay pass off responsibility for the electors as “my way of taking that responsibility to zero.” 45

Clark told the Select Committee that “it never sat right with me that there was no . . . contingency whereby these votes would count.” 46 “I had real problems with the process,” Clark said, because “it morphed into something I didn’t agree with.” 47 In his view, the fake electors were “not necessarily duly nominated electors” despite being presented as such.48 He said he believed he warned his colleagues that “unless we have litigation pending like in these States, like I don’t think this is appropriate or, you know, this isn’t the right thing to do.” 49

Morgan told the Select Committee that he saw no value in pushing slates of purported electors if they were not authorized by a State government’s certificate of ascertainment. As he put it, “[M]y view was, as long as you didn’t have a certificate of ascertainment, then the electors were, for lack of a better way of saying it, no good or not—not valid.” 50 Findlay confirmed that Morgan told him after the Supreme Court ruling on December 11th that “there’s not really anything left for us to do on this project” and that “it doesn’t seem like a good idea for us to be involved in it.” 51

Campaign lawyers were not the only ones who doubted the legality of the fake elector plan. The Office of White House Counsel appears to have expressed concerns about it, as well. In his testimony to the Select Committee, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone acknowledged his view that by mid-December, the electoral process was “done.” Cipollone told the Select Committee that the White House Counsel’s office “probably” had discussions about the electors plan and that his Deputy, Pat Philbin, would have been involved in evaluating the electors issue.52 In an informal Committee interview, Philbin described the fake elector scheme as one of the “bad theories” that were like “Whac-A-Mole” in the White House during this period.53 Mr. Cipollone agreed with this characterization.54

In her testimony, Cassidy Hutchinson testified that she heard at least one member of the White House Counsel’s Office say that the plan was not legal:

Committee Staff: . . . to be clear, did you hear the White House Counsel’s Office say that this plan to have alternate electors meet and cast votes for Donald Trump in States that he had lost was not legally sound?

Hutchinson: Yes, sir.55

She also recalled a meeting that took place in or before mid-December during which this view was relayed to Giuliani and members of his team by lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office.56

By December 11th, Findlay emailed his main points of contact in six battleground States to say “[t]hank you for your work on the presidential elector project” and, in order to pass off his responsibilities, let them know that “Rudy’s team has designated Kenneth Chesebro as the point person for the legal documents” going forward.57

While the campaign’s core legal team stepped back from the fake elector effort on December 11th, it nonetheless went forward because “Rudy was in charge of [it]” and “[t]his is what he wanted to do,” according to Findlay.58 When Findlay was asked if this decision to let the effort proceed under Giuliani’s direction “was coming from your client, the President,” Findlay responded: “Yes, I believe so. I mean, he had made it clear that Rudy was in charge of this and that Rudy was executing what he wanted.” 59 Findlay also recalled being told that Chesebro’s elector memos had become “the justification for why Rudy and Ken were going to keep going forward with this stuff.” 60 He explained that Giuliani “really bought into Ken’s theory on this,” and that the two of them “were kind of the main ones driving this” from that point forward.61 Clark told the Select Committee that “. . . my understanding of who was driving the process . . . was Mayor Giuliani and his team.” 62 On December 10th, when Kenneth Chesebro emailed one of the State party officials involved in organizing the fake elector effort in Nevada, he reported that “I spoke this evening with Mayor Guiliani [sic], who is focused on doing everything possible to ensure that that [sic] all the Trump-Pence electors vote on Dec. 14.” 63

In the days that followed this handoff, Chesebro would draft and distribute documents intended for use in the Trump team’s fake elector ceremonies that were then shared with key contacts in Arizona,64 Georgia,65 Michigan,66 Nevada,67 New Mexico,68 Pennsylvania,69 and Wisconsin.70 He also gave some of the groups step-by-step logistical guidance, such as when and where they should convene, how many copies each person would need to sign, and to send their fake votes to Congress via registered mail.71 “Pretty Simple!” he commented in some of these emails.72

A campaign operative named Michael Roman was also tapped for a major operational role in the fake elector effort. When Findlay sent his email handing off certain responsibilities for the initiative, he also wrote that Giuliani’s team had designated Roman “as the lead for executing the voting on Monday” December 14th.73 Roman was the Trump Campaign’s Director of Election Day Operations (EDO), with team members who specialized in political outreach and mobilization in battleground States where the Trump team now urgently needed the fake electors to meet on December 14th.

With help from his EDO staff, as well as Giuliani’s team and RNC staffers working alongside the Campaign as part of the Trump Victory Committee, Roman ran an improvised “Electors Whip Operation.” 74 For example, Roman sent an email on December 12th directing an aide to create “a tracker for the electors” with tabs for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, listing contact information, whether they had been contacted, whether they agreed to attend on December 14th, and names of “[s]ubstitute electors” to replace any reticent or unavailable participants as needed.75 Roman referred to others on this email as the “WHIP TEAM” and directed them to fill out the spreadsheet, to update him on “what you have and what you need,” and to plan on a call that evening.76

In the days that followed, this group focused on tracking which Republicans previously named as President Trump’s nominees to the electoral college would be willing to show up for fake elector ceremonies, finding adequate substitutes for those who refused to attend, and actually coordinating the unrecognized elector signing ceremonies in seven States on December 14th.77 In all seven States, these efforts to mobilize fake electors benefitted from support from the RNC, as well as the State Republican parties.78 However, it was the Trump team who drove the process from start to finish, as one of the fake electors and later co-chair of the Michigan Republican party, Meshawn Maddock, told an audience in January 2022: “We fought to seat the electors. The Trump campaign asked us to do that.” 79

3.4 Some of the Proposed Fake Electors Express Concerns About the Plan

The Trump team’s fake elector plan raised concerns not just for several senior officials but also for some of the Republican activists being recruited to be the fake electors. Findlay told the Select Committee that “there were definitely electors in probably most of the States that had concerns about this process.” 80 After being tasked with reaching out to the potential fake electors, Findlay notified his colleagues on December 10th that “a lot of questions are arising” from them.” 81 He also noted that an RNC staffer seconded to the Trump Victory Committee “requested a call with the PA electors and/or leadership to address concerns,” which “may be necessary to get people to appear.” 82

The Republican Party of Pennsylvania’s general counsel relayed several specific concerns to the Trump Campaign via email on December 13th. Warning that “[w]e’re all getting call [sic] from concerned Electors,” he elaborated as follows:

I’m told that on the call with the Electors they were told that the Ballot form would be conditioned upon ultimate certification by the Governor, indemnification by the campaign if someone gets sued or worse, (charged with something by the AG or someone else), and the receipt by the Electors of a legal opinion by a national firm and certified to be accurate by a Pa. lawyer.

What was sent was a “memo” by Chesebro not addressed to the Electors, and no certification by a Pa. lawyer. To make it worse, Chesebro describes the Pa. plan as “dicey”. And there’s no indication by anyone with authority that there’s any indemnification authorized by the campaign.83

Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Lawrence Tabas informed the Select Committee that his State’s fake electors never were indemnified by the Trump Campaign.84

When Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt was notified in late November that “the campaign wants to [sic] list of electors,” he texted his executive director that “I am def concerned about their inquiry” and that “I hope they are not planning on asking us to do anything like try and say we are only the proper electors.” 85 On December 12th, after Hitt received a message about a phone call with Giuliani to discuss the fake elector issue, he texted a colleague: “These guys are up to no good and its [sic] gonna fail miserably.” 86 Despite such concerns, Hitt and many other fake electors participated anyway.87

Even so, 14 of the original Republicans who had been listed as electoral college nominees on the November ballot bowed out when the fake Trump electors gathered in December.88 Former Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land declined to attend, which the State’s GOP chair, Laura Cox, told the Select Committee was because “I think she just said she was uncomfortable with the whole thing” and that she “has her own beliefs.” 89 A senior advisor for the Pennsylvania GOP said that Chairman Tabas “did not serve as an elector because Joe Biden won the election and it was Biden’s electors that were certified.” 90 Former U.S. Representative Tom Marino (R–PA) said he backed out because “I’m a constitutionalist,” and “as a former prosecutor, when the attorney general says that he’s not finding anything there, that’s good enough for me.” 91 The other eleven dropouts included a Georgia State lawmaker, a former State party chair from New Mexico, two former State party chairs from Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania’s RNC national committeewoman.92

Other participants asserted that they would have had much greater concerns if the Trump team had been more forthcoming about how the fake electoral votes would be used.93 The Trump Campaign’s director of election day operations in Georgia told the Select Committee that “I absolutely would not have” wanted to participate in organizing the Trump team’s fake electors in Georgia “had I known that the three main lawyers for the campaign that I’d spoken to in the past and were leading up were not on board.” 94 He said he felt “angry” because “no one really cared if—if people were potentially putting themselves in jeopardy” by doing this, and “we were just . . . useful idiots or rubes at that point.” 95

3.5 On December 14th, The Fake Electors Meet and Vote

On December 14th, using instructions provided by Chesebro, the fake Trump electors gathered and participated in signing ceremonies in all seven States. In five of these States—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin—the certificates they signed used the language that falsely declared themselves to be “the duly elected and qualified Electors” from their State.96 This declaration was false because none of the signatories had been granted that official status by their State government in the form of a certificate of ascertainment.

The paperwork signed by the fake Trump electors in two other States contained partial caveats. In New Mexico, the document they signed made clear that they were participating “on the understanding that it might later be determined that we are the duly elected and qualified Electors. . . .” 97 In Pennsylvania, the document they signed indicated that they were participating “on the understanding that if, as a result of a final non-appealable Court Order or other proceeding prescribed by law, we are ultimately recognized as being the duly elected and qualified Electors. . . .” 98

All seven of these invalid sets of electoral votes were then transmitted to Washington, DC. Roman’s team member in Georgia, for example, sent him an email on the afternoon of December 14th that affirmed the following: “All votes cast, paperwork complete, being mailed now. Ran pretty smoothly.” 99 Likewise, Findlay updated Campaign Manager Bill Stepien and his bosses on the legal team that the Trump team’s slate in Georgia was not able to satisfy all provisions of State law but still “voted as legally as possible under the circumstances” before transmitting their fake votes to Washington, DC, by mail.100

On the evening of December 14th, RNC Chairwoman McDaniel provided an update for President Trump on the status of the fake elector effort. She forwarded President Trump’s executive assistant an “Elector Recap” email, which conveyed that “President Trump’s electors voted” not just in “the states that he won” but also in six “contested states” (specifically, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).101 Minutes later, President Trump’s executive assistant replied: “It’s in front of him!” 102

The Trump team and the fake electors also engaged in acts of subterfuge to carry out their plans on December 14th. For instance, a campaign staffer notified the Georgia participants via email that he “must ask for your complete discretion.” 103 He explained that their efforts required “complete secrecy,” and told them to arrive at the State capitol building and “please state to the guards that you are attending a meeting with either Senator Brandon Beach or Senator Burt Jones.” 104 Indeed, Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that he tried to enter this group’s meeting room but “[a] guy at the door called it an ‘education meeting’ and scrambled when I tried to walk in.” 105

Former Michigan GOP Chair Laura Cox told the Select Committee that an attorney who “said he was working with the President’s Campaign” informed her that the Michigan slate for President Trump was “planning to meet in the capit[o]l and hide overnight so that they could fulfill the role of casting their vote in, per law, in the Michigan chambers.” 106 She said that she “told him in no uncertain terms that that was insane and inappropriate,” and that she warned Michigan’s senate majority leader as a precaution.107 Instead, the group of fake electors in Michigan signed their paperwork in the State GOP headquarters, where staff told them not to bring phones inside.108

3.6 The Fallout from the Fake Elector Plan

In spite of the Trump Campaign’s efforts to give the fake electors’ votes the sheen of authenticity, they failed. The U.S. Senate Parliamentarian noted in correspondence by January 3rd that materials from the Trump team’s supposed electors in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania had “no seal of the state” and “no evidence votes were delivered by the executive of the state for signature by electors,” 109 and, as a result, these materials failed to meet requirements of federal law. Similarly, the Senate Parliamentarian noted that the Trump team’s slates from Georgia, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania appeared to violate another statute which requires the approval of the Governor for the substitution of electors.110 Meanwhile, the documents from Michigan and Wisconsin did not even arrive to Congress on time, so they also had missed the required statutory deadline.111

Several of the Trump team’s fake electoral slates also failed to follow State rules specifying where they were required to meet. In Georgia and Wisconsin, State lawmakers or their staff appear to have helped participants gather inside their State capitols.112 But in Michigan, the fake Trump electors were blocked from entering the State capitol building.113 Despite this, they still signed documents attesting that they “convened and organized in the State Capitol, in the City of Lansing, Michigan, and at 2:00 p.m. . . . performed the duties enjoined upon us.” 114 That document had been signed earlier in the day off-site, and one of the signatories even told the Committee she didn’t join their march to the State capitol building because she “didn’t see a need to go.” 115

If the entire premise of the fake votes was not enough, these infirmities also meant that they had no legal relevance. In no way could they ever have been used by the Vice President to disregard the real votes of electors chosen by the voters.

In the weeks between December 14th and January 6th, President Trump’s team continued to embrace the idea that the fake electoral votes had a purpose. Although Giuliani and White House speechwriter Stephen Miller made public comments on December 14th suggesting that the uncertified Trump votes were merely contingent, that pretense was dropped in short order.116

For example, on December 17th, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News that in numerous States “there has been an alternate slate of electors voted upon that Congress will decide in January.” 117 On December 21st, President Trump and Vice President Pence each joined parts of a White House meeting in which Members of Congress from the Freedom Caucus encouraged the Vice President to reject Biden electors from one or more of the seven contested States.118 And days later, Eastman cited the existence of the fake votes in an email to Boris Epshteyn, a member of the Giuliani legal team, writing, “[t]he fact that we have multiple slates of electors demonstrate[s] the uncertainty of either. That should be enough.” 119

As discussed further in Chapter 5, that email contained Eastman’s 2-page memo proposing a strategy for January 6th based on the incorrect legal theory that Vice President Pence could assert some authority as President of the Senate to prevent or delay the election of former Vice President Biden during the joint session. Eastman’s memo relied on the fake votes, which the memo featured in the very first line: “7 states have transmitted dual slates of electors.” 120 When Eastman submitted his memo to Epshteyn, he also copied Chesebro, who had edited the memo and called it “[r]eally awesome.” 121

By that point, Chesebro and Eastman were coordinating their arguments about the fake-elector votes and how they should be used. On January 1, 2021, Chesebro sent an email to Eastman and Epshteyn that recommended that Vice President Pence derail the joint session of Congress. In it, he raised the idea of Vice President Pence declaring “that there are two competing slates of electoral votes” in several States, and taking the position that only he, or possibly Congress, could “resolve any disputes concerning them.” 122

Two days later, Eastman completed his second major memo advising President Trump and his team on strategies for January 6th, again arguing that there were “dual slates of electors from 7 states,” and calling for Vice President Pence to assert power to act “[a]s the ultimate arbiter” to take steps that could overturn the election, either by sending the election back to State legislatures to reassess or by rejecting Biden’s certified electoral votes from States in which there were also fake Trump electors.123

By early January, most of the fake elector votes had arrived in Washington, except those from Michigan and Wisconsin.124 Undeterred, the Trump team arranged to fly them to Washington and hand deliver them to Congress for the Vice President himself. “Freaking trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the senate President . . .” Wisconsin Republican Party official Mark Jefferson wrote to Party Chairman Hitt on January 4th.125 Hitt responded, “Ok I see I have a missed call from [Mike] Roman and a text from someone else. Did you talk to them already? This is just nuts. . . .” 126

The next day, Trump Campaign Deputy Director for Election Day Operations G. Michael Brown sent a text message to other campaign staff suggesting that he was the person who delivered the fake votes to Congress.127 After sending the group a photo of his face with the Capitol in the background, Brown said, “This has got to be the cover a book I write one day” and “I should probably buy [Mike] [R]oman a tie or something for sending me on this one. Hasn’t been done since 1876 and it was only 3 states that did it.” 128 The reference to 1876 alludes to a controversy during that election about certain States’ electoral college votes.129

President Trump and his Campaign apparently had assistance from allies on Capitol Hill for this effort, including Senator Ron Johnson, his chief of staff, and the chief of staff to Representative Mike Kelly, although Senator Johnson has said that “[his] involvement in that attempt to deliver” fake elector paperwork “spanned the course of a couple seconds.” 130 On the morning of January 6th, Representative Kelly’s then-chief of staff texted an aide to the Vice President, Chris Hodgson, about hand-delivering the fake elector votes to the Vice President’s team before the joint session, a message that Hodgson ignored: “Just following up-any chance you or someone from your team can meet to take the Michigan and Wisconsin packets.” 131

According to the office of Senator Ron Johnson, Representative Kelly’s chief of staff then had a phone call with Senator Johnson’s chief of staff at 11:58 a.m. “about how Kelly’s office could get us the electors [sic] because they had it.” 132 Shortly after 11:30 a.m., the Trump Campaign’s lead attorney in Wisconsin had texted Senator Johnson expressing a “[n]eed to get a document on Wisconsin electors to you [for] the VP immediately. Is there a staff person I can talk to immediately.” 133 Senator Johnson then put his chief of staff in touch with the campaign to handle the issue.134

Shortly afterwards, Senator Johnson’s chief of staff texted Hodgson: “[Sen.] Johnson needs to hand something to VPOTUS please advise.” 135 When Hodgson asked what it was, the response he got was, “Alternate slate of electors for MI and WI because archivist didn’t receive them.” 136 Hodgson did not mince words: “Do not give that to him [the Vice President]. He’s about to walk over to preside over the joint session, those were supposed to come in through the mail.” 137

Those fake electoral votes, which the Trump team tried for weeks to manufacture and deliver, never made it to the Vice President. But they would have been invalid even if they did arrive on time. The Trump team’s activities were based on the false pretense that these fake electoral votes had a decisive role to play at the joint session of Congress. And yet any such role that they could have played would have helped unlawfully obstruct an official proceeding that determines how our Nation carries out the peaceful transfer of power between Presidents.

Indeed, as the joint session approached, Senator Mike Lee had expressed grave concerns about the fake elector effort in a series of text messages to one of the Trump team’s senior legal advisors. Although Senator Lee had spent a month encouraging the idea of having State legislatures endorse competing electors for Trump, he grew alarmed as it became clear that the Trump team wanted the fake electors’ votes to be considered on January 6th

...

On December 30th, Senator Lee texted Trump advisor Cleta Mitchell that January 6th was “a dangerous idea,” including “for the republic itself.” 139 He explained that, “I don’t think we have any valid basis for objecting to the electors” because “it cannot be true that we can object to any state’s presidential electors simply because we don’t think they handled their election well or suspect illegal activity.” 140 Senator Lee even questioned her about the plan’s dangerous long-term consequences: “[w]ill you please explain to me how this doesn’t create a slippery slope problem for all future presidential elections?” 141

ENDNOTES*

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philly inq

https://www.mcall.com/news/pennsylvania/mc-nws-pa-republicans-jan-6-help-trump-20221222-ccq7ly5w2rfergjbcnwdatya3a-story.html

hundreds of pages of deposition transcripts released Wednesday by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack offered new insights into the roles Pennsylvania Republicans played in aiding President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The committee is expected to issue the full report on its investigation on Thursday. But the newly released transcripts were filled with new details including that Mike Roman, a Philadelphia native and one of Trump’s top election advisers, helped spearhead the effort to send pro-Trump electors to Washington as Congress met to certify the election results that day.

They also revealed a previously undisclosed attempt by state Sen. Doug Mastriano to access certain voting machines days before Jan. 6 as well as references to a plan floated by the White House to sue Pennsylvania directly in the U.S. Supreme Court over its administration of the 2020 vote. The documents also shed new light on the role a congressional staffer for U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly played behind the scenes.

Here are some of the highlights from the committee’s interviews:

Mike Roman: A key Trump campaign operative’s role in the false electors scheme

Roman, a longtime Philadelphia Republican political operative, appeared to play a key role in organizing false electors in swing states such as Pennsylvania as part of a plot to overturn the election.

A former Philadelphia ward leader and senior adviser to the Trump campaign, Roman was designated by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as “the lead for executing the voting” by the fake electors Dec. 14, 2020, according to an email the committee cited in an interview transcript released Wednesday.

The interview transcript suggests the pro-Trump electors in Pennsylvania were concerned about possible legal exposure if they signed official certificates purporting to be the legitimate electors.

In the interview, investigators referenced a Dec. 12, 2020, email sent to Roman from Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro.

“Mike, here is my suggested language for dealing with the concern raised in the PA conference call about electors possibly facing legal exposure, parenthesis, at the hands of a partisan AG, close parenthesis, if they seem to certify that they are currently the valid electors,” the transcript says.

Investigators also asked Roman whether he knew if Mastriano, the state senator who ran as the GOP’s candidate for Pennsylvania governor this year, had expressed concerns about the elector plan. Roman pleaded the Fifth.

The transcript suggests Roman also played a role in organizing the delivery of Wisconsin Republicans’ fake elector certificate to Congress on Jan. 6. A person investigators identified as Michael Brown texted associates that he “should probably buy Roman a tie for sending me on this one. Hasn’t been done since 1876 ... ”

That’s an apparent reference to the disputed presidential election that year.

Roman refused to say whether he’d instructed Brown to deliver the document, the transcript says.

The interview transcript also references a briefing of Pennsylvania lawmakers in November 2020 about purported election fraud. On Nov. 8, 2020, Roman shared with an associate a screenshot of a message he’d obtained that said: “Maybe the Trump campaign should get some actual evidence of fraud and file in court. They’ve been horrible in their court filings. We just got a report from their legal team. They told us on caucus they have zero evidence.”

Roman declined to tell investigators who sent him the message or to discuss the briefing of Pennsylvania lawmakers, apparently delivered by Kentucky’s secretary of state.

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly: Staffer’s behind-the-scenes involvement in false electors effort

Committee investigators repeatedly asked Roman during his deposition what he knew about behind-the-scenes efforts to undermine the election by a longtime top aide to U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, a Butler County Republican and a top Trump ally in the House.

Between Nov. 21 and Dec. 4, 2020, Roman exchanged 25 messages with Kelly’s then-chief-of-staff, Matt Stroia, according to questioning in the deposition transcripts. Those included exchanges that suggested Stroia may have played a more active and earlier role in the efforts by Trump and his allies than was previously known.

His name had previously surfaced in the committee’s work in connection with efforts to deliver the slates of pro-Trump electors to Pence on Jan. 6.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has said his office passed along the lists to Pence but that it was Kelly’s office that provided it to him. And while Kelly initially denied Johnson’s claims as “patently false,” the congressman’s office later acknowledged an “internal investigation” found Stroia had been in contact with Johnson’s staff.

But Roman’s deposition before the Jan. 6 Committee suggests Stroia may also have played a role in organizing a raucous Nov. 25 state Senate hearing in Gettysburg, during which Mastriano and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis pushed unfounded claims of fraud in the Pennsylvania election. Trump called in from Washington to voice his support.

“I hope it turns out like we envisioned,” Stroia wrote to Roman three days before the hearing in a message quoted in the deposition transcripts.

During his interview with the Jan. 6 Committee, Roman pleaded the Fifth and refused to answer questions about it or discuss whether he or Stroia had any involvement in organizing the Gettysburg hearing.

But other messages cited in Roman’s deposition show Stroia was in direct contact with Giuliani, who spearheaded Trump’s election challenges in the state. In one exchange with Roman, Stroia said he’d directed the president’s lawyer to talk to Roman instead.

“Do you know why Mr. Giuliani would have been calling Mike Kelly’s chief of staff ... about presidential election issues rather than you, who was acting as director of election day operations for the campaign?” committee staffers asked. He added: “I told him that you will know everything I do.”

Asked to explain, Roman again pleaded the Fifth.

Doug Mastriano and Jenna Ellis: The state senator and Trump lawyer sought access to Pennsylvania voting machines

The committee’s interview with Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis also shed light on Mastriano’s postelection activities.

“We made good headway convincing [hopefully] two counties with Dominion machines in Pennsylvania,” Mastriano wrote in a Dec. 28 email to Ellis, according to the transcript.

In another email, Mastriano makes reference to efforts to gain access to “ballot images.” Ellis declined to tell investigators why Mastriano was interested in that.

In a Dec. 29 email, Mastriano told Ellis that he’d emailed Trump himself with a letter related to “securing voluntary access for Dominion forensics.”

Fulton County later gave a third-party firm access to its Dominion voting machines, facilitated by Mastriano and state Sen. Judy Ward, R-Blair, for a supposed “audit” of the votes. That prompted the state to decertify those voting machines and force the county to obtain new ones. It wasn’t immediately clear which other counties Mastriano and other Trump allies sought to hand over access to voting machines.

Ellis was also questioned about her contacts with Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler and Jake Corman and Kim Ward, the GOP leaders of the State Senate. She declined to answer questions, however, on any efforts she and Giuliani had made to pressure them to set aside the state’s election results.

Cutler previously told the committee that Giuliani and Ellis called him daily during the run-up to Congress’ certification of the election, looking to push a baseless theory that state legislatures could set aside election results based on unsupported suspicions of fraud and appoint a new slate of Electoral College delegates instead.

Cutler said he largely avoided those calls, thinking they were inappropriate and had his attorneys respond, asking Giuliani and Ellis to stop contacting him.

Jeffrey Clark: A White House plan to sue Pennsylvania in the U.S. Supreme Court

In December 2020, Trump had White House lawyers draft a complaint to sue Pennsylvania in the U.S. Supreme Court over the administration of its election, according to committee questioning in the deposition of former Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Clark.

Clark, a Philadelphia native, has emerged as a central focus for the committee due to his role in a drama in which Trump briefly considered appointing him attorney general in the waning days of his administration.

Clark had been introduced to the president by U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a York County Republican and key ally of the president in Congress. And according to earlier testimony before the committee, Clark expressed a willingness to use the Justice Department to pressure state legislatures in battleground states to overturn their election results despite no evidence of significant fraud.

On Monday, the Jan. 6 Committee referred him to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution.

During two contentious deposition interviews with the committee in November 2021 and February 2022, Clark refused to answer almost any questions about his relationship to Perry, his conversations with Trump, or the ideas he floated on how the Justice Department could help contest the election. He repeatedly invoked executive privilege — the doctrine that allows presidents and their staff to resist some legislative oversight — as well as his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

He also balked at answering questions about the draft complaint that a White House assistant sent to top officials at the Justice Department on Dec. 29, 2020, for a suit against Pennsylvania. Correspondence referenced in the deposition of Ellis, the Trump lawyer, also referenced a Trump campaign plan to ask the Supreme Court to order new elections in as many as eight states to “ensure electoral integrity.” Those suits were never filed.

Instead, the Trump campaign filed a brief in support of a long-shot lawsuit filed at the Supreme Court by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeking to overturn Pennsylvania’s election. The justices declined to hear the case.

For his part, Clark during his deposition — in one of his only substantive exchanges with committee members — lamented the current partisan state of politics in Washington, recalling his own upbringing in a primarily white, working-class neighborhood near the foot of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.

“My dad was a truck driver who never graduated from high school,” he said. “He was a lifelong Democrat and a Catholic. My mom was a lifelong Republican and a Protestant. I wound up as a blend of the two, a Catholic conservative Republican.”

His lawyer Harry MacDougald was more acerbic. He called the Jan. 6 committee’s questioning “railroading” and accused members of indulging in a “paranoid fantasy.”

“It is not enough in Washington to merely disagree with someone about policy questions,” he said. “Instead, they must be destroyed. Those who disagree with Mr. Clark seek his destruction by any means available.”

The QAnon Hummer Duo: Coordination among right-wing extremist groups

Deposition transcripts were also released Wednesday for two Virginia men who made headlines in Philadelphia when they showed up outside the 2020 vote count at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in a Hummer filled with guns and emblazoned with QAnon stickers.

But the transcripts show neither Joshua Macias, president of the organization Veterans for Trump, nor his bodyguard, Antonio LaMotta, were forthcoming in their interviews with committee investigators. Both men asserted their Fifth Amendment rights again and again, citing their ongoing prosecution in Philadelphia for weapons violations and attempted election interference.

(They were both later convicted on the weapons counts in October, but acquitted on the election related charges. LaMotta has since been federally charged with illegally entering the Capitol on Jan. 6.)

The committee’s investigators attempted to quiz both men on their contacts with other right-wing extremist groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters — the leaders of which Macias and LaMotta were shown in videos to have interacted with Jan. 5.

One video played during an earlier committee hearing showed Macias meeting with Enrique Tarrio, then-president of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, head of the Oath Keepers, in a Washington parking garage the day before the Capitol attack. Committee members have previously cited the video to suggest some coordination among extremist groups in the run-up to Jan. 6.

But when asked in his deposition how he came to be in the garage, Macias remained tight lipped.

“I walked,” he responded.

Investigators asked him why. “I was asked to,” he said.

By whom? “Someone said, ‘Hey come here,” Macias replied.

He refused to say what they discussed in that meeting.

As for whether he considered himself a QAnon adherent, Macias responded: “I do not ascribe to people’s beliefs. I have my own belief system.”

Philadelphia Inquirer staff writers Jonathan Lai and Jonathan Tamari contributed to this article.

===

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/15/jan-6-trump-operative-false-electors-00046175

Trump campaign operative who delivered Jan. 6 false elector lists is identified

Mike Roman passed the names to a House GOP aide in a bid to get them to then-Vice President Mike Pence, people familiar with the episode told POLITICO.

By KYLE CHENEY and NICHOLAS WU

07/15/2022

A little-known Donald Trump campaign operative delivered lists of false electors to Capitol Hill in a bid to get them to Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two people familiar with the episode.

Mike Roman, then Trump’s 2020 director of Election Day operations, delivered those false elector certificates — signed by pro-Trump activists in Michigan and Wisconsin — to Rep. Mike Kelly’s (R-Pa.) chief of staff at the time, both people told POLITICO. Kelly was a Trump ally in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, and his then-top aide received the documents from Roman before deputizing a colleague to disseminate copies on Capitol Hill, according to both people.

Roman’s role in the effort to deliver those slates of electors directly to Pence has not previously been reported. The onetime Trump White House researcher [bad code] ...

The origin of the false elector lists, which never got to Pence before he presided over certification of Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, has become an enduring subplot in the select panel’s investigation of the Capitol attack designed to disrupt that day. After the committee revealed the role of a top aide to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in the episode during a hearing last month, Johnson said the false elector lists came from Kelly — who has repeatedly denied any involvement by his office in their distribution.[vid?]

"They have changed their story, from denying their involvement outright to now not denying their former chief of staff’s involvement,” said Alexa Henning, a Johnson spokesperson. “Congressman Kelly should be issuing Senator Johnson an apology for participating in the perpetration of false stories regarding Senator Johnson’s minimal involvement in this matter.”

Kelly has recently touted the results of an “internal investigation” that identified Matt Stroia, his chief of staff at the time, as the intermediary for the lists. That inquiry found that the lists were never passed from Stroia, now a Pfizer lobbyist, to Johnson’s office. Kelly’s office, in response to a request for comment, said Stroia had a previous relationship with members of the Trump team and got contacted by someone linked to that team on Jan. 6.

“Matthew got the information,” Kelly’s current chief of staff, Tim Butler, said in an interview. “There was another staffer here in the office who was asked to physically walk it over. And it’s just those two individuals that were involved.”

Neither of those two individuals worked in Kelly’s office any longer, Butler said. Kelly’s office declined to identify the other staffer involved.

Neither Roman nor Stroia returned requests for comment for this story.

Both people who confirmed Roman’s involvement in the transmission of the elector lists spoke on condition of anonymity amid the select panel’s ongoing investigation into the runup to the attack and Trump’s role in it.

[INSURRECTION FALLOUT

‘His own choices’: Select panel says Trump — not his advisers — set Jan. 6 in motion

BY KYLE CHENEY AND NICHOLAS WU

The Jan. 6 committee’s mention of his office’s role put Johnson, facing a tough reelection race this fall, on the back foot. He later told a home-state radio host: “My office’s entire involvement in this thing lasted 70 minutes. My involvement was probably seconds, maybe a minute or two.”

Roman’s involvement, however, clarifies another piece of the puzzle behind Trump’s effort to seize a second term he didn’t win. Trump, relying on a band of fringe attorneys, spent much of December 2020 leaning on Republican state legislatures in a handful of states to ignore the results and deliver pro-Trump electors to Congress.

Under Trump’s plan, Pence — required by the Constitution to preside over the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021 — would cite the “alternate” and illegitimate electors to block Biden’s victory or delay the count altogether. Ultimately, no state legislature agreed to Trump’s plan, but the former president’s campaign still assembled activists to sign false documents claiming to be genuine presidential electors and delivered them to Congress.

The plan fell apart when Pence refused to go along, contending that doing so would violate multiple provisions of federal law and insisting he had no power to do anything other than introduce certified electoral votes. Pence, who had huddled with advisers and the Senate parliamentarian to flesh out his position, had decided well before Jan. 6 that he would not attempt to overturn Biden’s victory.

But that didn’t stop the Trump campaign from attempting to place some of the false slates directly into Pence’s hands on Jan. 6.

The Justice Department is in talks with the select committee about evidence specifically related to the false electors effort, Jan. 6 panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said this week.

DOJ has in recent weeks subpoenaed a slew of Trump allies who acted as false electors, including several state GOP chairs. It has also subpoenaed state-level operatives working on Trump’s campaign.

In addition, FBI agents recently seized the phone of attorney John Eastman, a top strategist for Trump’s effort who worked closely on the plan to appoint false electors. Eastman is fighting in a New Mexico federal court to get his phone back but was dealt a setback Friday evening when a judge denied his motion for a restraining order.

When subpoenaing Roman, who is from Pennsylvania, the select committee cited records reflecting his push to convince Republican state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump slates of presidential electors as part of a strategy to boost the losing campaign.

“[T]he Select Committee is in possession of communications reflecting your involvement in a coordinated strategy to contact Republican members of state legislatures in certain states that former President Trump had lost and urge them to “reclaim” their authority by sending an alternate slate of electors that would support former President Trump,” Thompson wrote in a letter accompanying the subpoena.

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

===

an 1 23

a new report is shedding light on Sen. Mike Lee's (R-Utah) attempt to Constitutionally justify former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the presidential election.

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection has released a transcript detailing his conversations with top lawyers who worked on Trump's campaign.

"Transcripts, documents, text messages, and the final report from the House Jan. 6th Committee show Lee actively tried to keep Donald Trump in the White House, despite Trump’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election, and only abandoned the plot when it threatened to expand beyond that constitutional framework," the report reads.

The report also went in-depth about Lee's communications with Cleta Mitchell, a legal advisor for the former president's campaign.

"The Jan. 6 committee has now revealed that Lee was communicating with top Trump campaign legal adviser Cleta Mitchell that same day about strategies for keeping Trump in office," the report reads. "Mitchell was part of the now-infamous phone call where Trump pressured Georgia election officials to 'find' enough votes to give him the win in that state."

One of the text messages also focused on Lee texting Mitchell saying, “What should I be doing right now? I’m trying to find out what’s winnable and what isn’t. I suspect that the only way to win this election would involve identifying systemic fraud.”

At one point, Lee also contacted Mitchell in hopes of obtaining more information about alternate electors.

“Is there any chance we will see competing slates of electors named in some states?” Lee asked.

Mitchell reportedly instructed the Utah lawmaker to contact former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who also had a role in the scheme. One day prior to Mitchell's suggestion, Lee per Salt Lake Tribune insisted that if “a very small handful of states' appointed alternate electors, 'there could be a path'" to overturn the election.

Although Mitchell has been tied to the scheme, she offered a different perspective during her testimony before the committee. According to her, Lee was the mastermind behind the idea.

“It wasn’t my idea,"Mitchell claimed. "It was actually Mike Lee’s idea."

===

an ah 12 22

No one can accuse the January 6 Select Committee’s final report of not being comprehensive; the report, which National Public Radio (NPR) has published in its entirety on its website, is 845 pages long. One of the many things the Committee covers in the report is the fake electors plot of late 2020, which found MAGA Republicans in swing states circulating bogus Electoral College documents in an effort to give electoral votes that now-President Joe Biden legitimately won to Donald Trump.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark the morning after Christmas 2022, attorney/columnist Philip Rotner examines what the January 6 Committee’s final report has to say about that plot and lays out some reasons why it makes a strong argument for criminally prosecuting Trump.

“On December 14, 2020,” Rotner explains, “Republican operatives in at least five states — each of which had already officially certified Joe Biden as the winner — forged and submitted to Congress and the National Archives fake Electoral College certificates purporting to certify Donald Trump, not Biden, as the ‘duly elected’ winner. The left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight first blew the whistle on the fake elector scheme in March 2021, but it wasn’t until Rachel Maddow devoted a series of shows to it in January 2022 that it really captured public attention.”

The attorney/columnist continues, “The fake electors were hardly the worst of what Trump visited on us. For sheer journalistic sex appeal, a scheme by a bunch of unknown, bumbling state functionaries to phony up some documents just can’t compete with a president siccing an armed mob on the Capitol. But the fake elector scandal, while not the most shocking of Trump’s predations, has long looked like the straightest route to cracking open the entire 2020 election scheme, and to getting Donald Trump indicted and convicted of a crime — at least until the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents scandal was revealed, but that’s another story.”

Rotner stresses that if Trump was a “knowing participant” in the “fake elector scheme,” that would be damning whether or not he honestly believed that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

“Even if he really, truly believed the election was stolen, it would not be a defense to criminal charges for participating in a fraudulent scheme to submit forged documents as the official results of state presidential elections,” Rotner argues. “To the contrary, his belief that he was stealing back a stolen election would be highly incriminating proof of his motive, not a defense…. If it can be proved that Trump intentionally participated in the scheme to try to pass off forged documents as official state documents, and then use the phony documents to overturn an election, it wouldn’t make any difference why he did so. The act of participating in the scheme, in and of itself, regardless of his purported reasons for doing so, would still run afoul of all kinds of state and federal criminal laws.”

Rotner continues, “The path to prosecuting Trump for the fake elector scheme — either as a standalone crime or as a crucial element of a larger conspiracy to overturn the results of a presidential election —became much clearer last week with the publication of the final report of the House January 6 Committee.”

The January 6 Committee’s final report, according to Rotner, shows that “the scheme went all the way to the top, right up to Trump himself” and that “while some of the lower-level participants in the scheme — most likely some of the state-level GOP operatives who actually signed the phony certificates — may have been duped into believing that that it was a contingency plan, the higher ups who created and executed the scheme knew better."

“According to the report, by December 8, 2020 — less than three weeks after (attorney Kenneth) Chesebro first laid the groundwork for the scheme in a November 18 memo — ‘President Trump had decided to pursue the fake elector plan and was driving it,’” Rotner notes. “By mid-December, Trump had enlisted the assistance of RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in the scheme, worked with Rudy Giuliani on its implementation, and been informed that litigation would be filed in four states ‘to create a pretext to claim that it was still possible for the fake electors to be authorized retroactively.’ So, it appears that the previously missing link — the link between the fake elector scheme and Trump himself — is no longer missing. Trump not only ‘participated’ in the fake elector scheme, he orchestrated it.”

an 9 22

The New York Times reported Monday afternoon that at least 40 subpoenas have been filed for allies of former President Donald Trump over the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election using the fake electors.

At least two of Trump's top advisers had their phones taken by the FBI, sources told the Times. Boris Epshteyn, a Russian-American Republican political strategist who served as a strategic adviser to Trump's 2020 campaign was one of those who had to surrender his phone. The other was Mike Roman an opposition researcher who worked for Trump from 2017 to 2018. He went on to work on the campaign, and became the person who handed off the envelope of fake electors to be given to Vice President Mike Pence.

The Times described it as an indication that the Justice Department's case is escalating after slow movement for the past several months.

Dan Scavino, Trump’s former social media director is also among those who got a subpoena from the case.

Former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik was another subpoenaed. He was on the team with Rudy Giuliani and helping with the so-called "war room" on Jan. 6 at the Willard Hotel.

Some of the information, the Times explained, was asking about activities around the Save America PAC, which has been the main source of funding for Trump since leaving office.

Read the full report here.

----

===

tpm 9 22

one of the sham Trump electors brought tech operatives hired by MAGA lawyer Sidney Powell to a Georgia county’s elections office on the day there was a breach in the office’s voting system, surveillance video footage reported by CNN, the Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

The footage reportedly shows the fake elector, then-Coffee County GOP chair Cathy Latham, escorting four technicians for SullivanStrickler — a data forensics company Powell hired in her bid to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump — to the elections office on Jan. 7 last year.

That was the day the office’s elections system was breached. Two of the technicians seen in the video with Latham, Scott Hall and Paul Maggio, have admitted to accessing a voting machine in Coffee County, per CNN. The Washington Post reported last month on how SullivanStrickler operatives copied data from a Dominion voting machine in Coffee County on Jan. 7.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is looking into the breach. Latham herself is a target in the Fulton County district attorney’s criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election in Georgia.

One of Latham’s attorneys told CNN on Tuesday that his client “would not and has not knowingly been involved in any impropriety in any election” and “did not authorize or participate in any ballot scanning efforts, computer imaging, or any similar activity in Coffee County in January 2021.”

Surveillance video also reportedly reveals that infamous Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and fellow election-denying tech consultant Jeffrey Lenberg visited the Coffee County elections office several times after the breach. Both operatives are being investigated in Michigan over alleged attempted breaches of voting equipment in that state.

===

an 9 22

Longtime Republican disruptor Newt Gingrich, Senior Advisor to then-President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, and longtime campaign advisor Jason Miller conducted an email discussion about posting ads falsely disputing the results of the 2020 election, according to a letter sent to Gingrich by the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.

“The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich said in one email, the Committee states in its letter which asks him to testify voluntarily and preserve all related documents.

The Committee says it also has evidence Gingrich was “involved in the fake elector scheme.”

Even in the hours after the violent but failed January 6 coup, the Committee says Gingrich “continued to push efforts to overturn te election results,” and emailed Mark Meadows at 10:42 PM.

Attorney and Professor of Law Anthony Michael Kreis says it “sounds like the January 6th Committee may have the goods on Newt Gingrich orchestrating part of a broader conspiring to solicit election fraud and/or commit unlawful interference with election administration under Georgia law.”

In its letter the Committee writes it “has obtained information indicating that you have knowledge about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and we write to seek your voluntary cooperation. Some of the information that we have obtained includes email messages that you exchanged with senior advisors to President Trump and others, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, in which you provided detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.”

“These advertising efforts were not designed to encourage voting for a particular candidate. Instead, these efforts attempted to cast doubt on the outcome of the election after voting had already taken place.,” the Committee’s letter to Gingrich reads. “They encouraged members of the public to contact their state officials and pressure them to challenge and overturn the results of the election. To that end, these advertisements were intentionally aired in the days leading up to December 14, 2020, the day electors from each state met to cast their votes for president and vice president,” the Committee adds.

“Among the numerous emails you exchanged regarding purported election fraud, you wrote on December 8, 2020, urging Donald Trump’s campaign to air advertisements promoting the false narrative that election workers had smuggled suitcases containing fake ballots at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia. This email shows that you provided line edits to the scripts used to produce television advertisements and suggested that the advertisements include a ‘call-to-action’ of pressuring state officials. You specifically pushed for national advertisements to include false allegations about what you called the ‘suitcase scandal.'”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/ginni-thomas-attempts-influence-overturn/

david b ncrm

Ginni Thomas‘ efforts to influence the overturning of the 2020 presidential election are even wider than previously known. Thomas, a far-right activist and lobby who happens to also be the spouse of the most right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justice, not only engaged in a months-long pressure campaign to influence then-Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to help overturn the results of the election, and pressured 29 GOP lawmakers in Arizona to overturn the election, but also pressured lawmakers in another critical battleground state, Wisconsin, to do so as well.

The Washington Post Thursday reports “new emails show that Thomas also messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen. Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on Nov. 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas. The Bernier email was obtained by The Post, and the Tauchen email was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to The Post.”

The Post published the text of the emails sent by Thomas.

“Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure,” the emails read. The Post notes they were sent “just days after major media organizations called the presidency for Biden.”

“Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our Constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen for our state,” they also say.

Thomas has promoted vile conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and other events.

“In posts on Facebook, she shared a George Soros conspiracy-theory meme and criticized the teenage survivors of the school massacre in Parkland, Fla., for supporting gun control,” The New York Times Magazine reported in February. “She complained when a town near her Virginia home put up a banner in support of Black Lives Matter, saying the group was filled with extremists ‘seeking to foment a cultural revolution,’ and traded barbs on her public Facebook page.”

Thomas sits on the board of the highly-influential and highly-secretive religious right wing Council for National Policy, which also includes more prominent members like Turning Point USA‘s Charlie Kirk, where Thomas has also served.

===

state gop Az

December 17, 2020

Ron Watkins, former administrator for the extremist bulletin board 8chan, urges Trump to “cross the Rubicon.” The phrase refers to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River with an army to install himself as sovereign, which precipitated starting a bloody Roman civil war. The phrase is echoed by Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward days later.

(Source: Twitter)

The Women for America First bus tour, meanwhile, pays a visit to a firearms academy near Nashville, Tennessee, and tour participant Jennifer Lynn Lawrence posts a video of herself, Kylie Jane Kremer, Dustin Stockton and Amy Kremer posing with rifles. The website for Tactical Response, the location where the video was reportedly filmed, features a tagline on its website: “We teach good people to kill bad people.”

(Source: Facebook)

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona alleges on Twitter that 700,000 votes were compromised and that Trump won Arizona despite the stated election results. Gosar includes the hashtag #StopTheSteal and tags Ali Alexander in his post.

(Source: Twitter)

December 19, 2020

Trump tweets out a call for his supporters to protest in D.C. on the day when Electoral College votes are set to be certified by Congress. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” Trump says, adding, “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

===

8 22 an raw story

the scheme to overthrow the 2020 presidential election using fake Trump electors in states President Joe Biden carried has been broadly panned as illegal by legal experts. Even John Eastman, the far-right lawyer who drafted the memo outlining the scheme, admitted in private to Trump that there was no real basis for it in law.

But according to Fox News commentator Mark Levin, it was a perfectly valid scheme. On Monday, he told his viewers, "That is to be resolved by the United States Congress. That is not a crime either. You might not like it. You might think it's weird, you might think it's unethical, but it's not a crime."

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), one of two Republicans on the House January 6 Committee and a key voice against Trump from the right, begged to differ, criticizing Levin's remark in a Twitter thread on Tuesday.

"The Eastman memos & fake elector scheme are indefensible," wrote Cheney, tagging Levin's account. "On the memos: Eastman took the opposite legal position a month before the election; he knew all 9 Justices would rule against him; & he admitted it was illegal in an Oval Office meeting & afterwards. White House lawyers said it was illegal too. The fake electoral slates were obviously false, and were transmitted to multiple federal officials for purposes of obstructing the electoral count. None of this is ambiguous."

"Watch the hearings, and read the opinion of the federal judge who concluded that Eastman and Trump likely violated two criminal statutes," concluded Cheney.

This comes amid recent reports that the Justice Department is zeroing in on Trump in its investigation into various schemes to overturn the election.

===

an 7 22

'Manna from heaven': Legal wonks react to fake elector scheme emails

Sarah K. Burris and Raw Story July 26, 2022

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that previously unknown communications between staff on Donald Trump's campaign revealed the work outside advisers were doing to try and overturn the election.

What's being called a "gift to prosecutors" proves both federal and state crimes, according to former impeachment lawyer Norm Eisen on Twitter.

In one email, internal advisers admitted that the "alternate slate of electors" were actually "fake electors." Many of the fake electors were subpoenaed by the Justice Department. The details that it was known that the electors were "fake" is "manna from heaven," said former New York Counsel Maya Wiley.

It was a sentiment shared by NYU Law School Professor Ryan Goodman. He highlighted the piece of the report that said they'd simply send the "'fake' electoral votes to Pence so that 'someone' in Congress can make an objection when they start counting vote, and start arguing that the 'fake' votes should be counted."

That almost happened with Sen. Ron Johnson's (R-WI) staffer reaching out to Mike Pence's aides to see if he could hand the fake electors to the vice president. Johnson has been asked about the details....

in a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” adding a smiley face emoji."

Maggie Haberman

@maggieNYT

===

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2022/07/26/arizona-fake-electors-electoral-college-jack-wilenchik-kelli-ward/10156607002/

media reports on Tuesday again highlighted (Or should we say lowlighted?) the sinister scheme of Arizona’s fake Electoral College electors and their part in trying to gut the democratic process and stage a coup to keep Donald Trump in office.

This time around, according to The New York Times, the “often slapdash efforts of advisers” to Trump included the names of reactionary Republican notables like Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward and attorney Jack Wilenchik.

The report quotes an email from Wilenchik to Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn that reads, “We (Arizona Republicans) would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted.”

Imagine that.

Blatantly admitting that the electors were “fake.”

Wilenchik said 'fake'? He meant to say ...

Kind of damning, don’t you think?

Perhaps that is why the report noted that Wilenchik sent a follow-up email saying, “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” followed by a smiley face emoji.

wilenchik also pointed out Ward’s part in the scheme, saying she wanted to keep the fake electors plot “under wraps until Congress counts the vote Jan. 6th (so we can try to ‘surprise’ the Dems and media with it) – I tend to agree with her.”

We already know from previous reporting that Ward and her husband, Michael, received grand jury subpoenas from the Department of Justice regarding their involvement in the fake electors operation.

Fake electors should pay a price for this

And we’ve known about the coup attempt almost from the beginning.

All of which might cause some to wonder why these latest revelations even need to be reported?

===

am oversight docs

https://www.americanoversight.org/document/nara-records-regarding-invalid-elector-slates

https://www.americanoversight.org/investigation/the-alternate-electors-plot-to-overturn-the-2020-election

In March 2021, American Oversight obtained copies of phony electoral vote certificates signed and submitted to the National Archives and Congress by supporters of former President Trump in seven swing states that had gone for Joe Biden: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The false certificates were part of a scheme to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021, in which Trump allies, pointing to lies about widespread voter fraud, sought to present the signatories as “alternate” slates of electors.

The documents drew renewed attention in January 2022 after they were covered by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Politico. The Justice Department said it was investigating the fake certificates, and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which had also been looking into the matter, issued subpoenas to the individuals listed as “chairperson” and “secretary” of each group of alternate electors. The next month, the committee issued six additional subpoenas to connected individuals.

A now-infamous memo prepared by Trump-allied lawyer John Eastman and titled “January 6 scenario” indicated that the fake certificates were part of a six-step scheme that relied on Pence throwing out the valid electors from “7 states [that] have transmitted dual slates of electors.” In February 2022, the New York Times reported that two weeks after the election, Jim Troupis, a lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, had received a memo setting out the strategy to overturn Trump’s loss by installing “alternate” electors in states Trump lost. According to the Times, that memo was used by Eastman and other Trump-allied lawyers as they devised the scheme.

In March, a federal judge ruled that it was “more likely than not” that Trump and Eastman had “corruptly attempted” to obstruct the Jan. 6 congressional certification, and ordered Eastman to produce more than 100 emails he had fought to keep from House investigators. More than a year and a half after the election, Eastman is still attempting to shield his communication records from the House select committee.

The fake certificates were also referenced in a draft letter prepared by Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark in December 2020 that falsely stated the department was investigating “various irregularities” in the election and would have instructed Georgia lawmakers to convene a special session to consider “issues pertaining to the appointment of presidential electors.” That same month, Trump had plotted to oust acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with Clark, a loyalist who was willing to use the department to elevate Trump’s voter-fraud myth.

In a lawsuit we filed against the Arizona Senate seeking records related to the partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, we obtained documents that show Kelly Townsend, then state senator-elect, asked former Vice President Mike Pence not to accept Arizona’s valid electoral slate during the congressional certification on Jan. 6. We also obtained and published memos concerning the appointment of electors that were sent to legislative leaders in Wisconsin and Arizona in the weeks following Trump’s loss.

The fake electoral certificates are a critical piece of the coordinated, multi-state effort to subvert the will of American voters. Since obtaining copies of the bogus certificates, American Oversight has sent follow-up requests for the communications of the false electors with Trump allies and false electors in other states. In several states, we are still seeking communications between signers of the phony elector slates and proponents of Trump’s Big Lie.

uPDATES

News Roundup: The ‘Wild/Creative’ Fake Electors Scheme

July 29, 2022

“Kind of wild/creative” — that’s how a Trump-allied lawyer, in an early December 2020 email, characterized the scheme to submit fake electoral certificates in an attempt to overturn the election results.

:{*:{Fake Electors and the Jan. 6 Investigation}:

“Kind of wild/creative” — that’s how a Trump-allied lawyer, in an early December 2020 email, characterized the scheme to submit fake electoral certificates as a way to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.*}:

The lawyer, Jack Wilenchik, was explaining the idea to Boris Epshteyn, a Trump campaign adviser. He repeatedly used the word “fake” to describe the certificates, following up with another email in which he wrote that calling them “alternative” was “probably a better term” — then added a smiley face emoji.
That email, reported on by the New York Times, was one of dozens exchanged campaign advisers and Trump allies — including lawyers who “made clear they knew that the pro-Trump electors they were putting forward might not hold up to legal scrutiny” — who were focused on drawing up the bogus slates in the month before Jan. 6.

According to the Times, Wilenchik had helped coordinate the fake certificate from Trump supporters in Arizona. Many of the same Trump associates who appear in the emails reviewed by the Times also figure into subpoenas issued last month to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and state Sen. Kelly Townsend.

Those subpoenas, as reported by the Washington Post this week, seek Fann’s and Townsend’s communications with those associates or relating to the fake certificate scheme.
American Oversight’s investigation of the Arizona Senate’s discredited “audit” of Maricopa County’s election results revealed that at that time in late 2020, as the former president’s allies desperately searched for voter fraud and sought ways to flip the state’s election results, Fann had been in touch with Rudy Giuliani and the Trump team.
The Post’s story also mentions the letter, obtained by American Oversight, that Townsend sent to Vice President Pence in late December asking him “to refrain from accepting the Biden electors” until legislators could look into election fraud claims.

The subpoenas to Fann and Townsend, reported the Post, “show the breadth of the criminal investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington,” which Attorney General Merrick Garland said was “the most wide-ranging” in the history of the Justice Department.

Justice Department investigators recently interviewed Marc Short and Greg Jacob, two top advisers to the former vice president, and CNN reported that the department has also reached out to additional Trump White House officials.
Prosecutors are also looking into Trump’s actions, reported the Washington Post, having recently asked “about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle” who sought to submit the fake electors.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department said that it had obtained a new search warrant for the phone of Trump-allied attorney John Eastman, who had sought to block investigators from accessing his files.

Meanwhile, the House Jan. 6 committee, which is considering issuing a subpoena to Ginni Thomas, is also expanding its investigation into Trump’s cabinet, having already interviewed Steve Mnuchin. It is also in discussion with Mike Pompeo for his testimony. Here are more headlines related to the investigation:

Trump’s defense secretary denies there were orders to have 10k troops ready to deploy on January 6 (CNN)
Mick Mulvaney, ex-White House acting chief of staff, testifies before the Jan. 6 committee (CNN)
House Democrats call for a new inspector general in Secret Service text investigation (NPR)
Secret Service identified potential missing text messages on phones of 10 individuals (CNN)
Trump didn’t want to call for Jan. 6 rioters’ prosecution, new video shows (Washington Post)

:{*:{‘Absolutely No Evidence of Fraud’}:

During a Thursday hearing in one of American Oversight’s lawsuits seeking public records from the partisan investigation of Wisconsin’s 2020 election, Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn said that the our litigation revealed the inquiry has shown “absolutely no evidence of election fraud.”*}:

Bailey-Rihn also noted that the state officials responsible for the investigation had failed to fully comply with Wisconsin’s open records law and had spent large amounts of taxpayer money at times when “there was no actual work being done.”
During the early months of the investigation, Bailey-Rihn said, “taxpayers were paying $11,000 [a month] for somebody to sit at the New Berlin library to learn about election law because they had no experience in election law.”
That “somebody,” of course, was attorney Michael Gableman, who heads the investigation and has advocated for state lawmakers to consider “decertifying” the 2020 election, a legally impossible recommendation that led this week to another grievance against him being filed with a state oversight board.
This week, American Oversight sent a letter to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which has failed to provide adequate responses to our requests for records in the possession of Commissioner Robert Spindell, who was one of his state’s fake electors.
The letter informs the commission that we will pursue all legal avenues to ensure the public release of those records, as required by the state’s open records law.

Lies about voter fraud have maintained a strong hold on conservatives in Wisconsin, where the wider effort to undermine faith in democracy is, as the New Yorker’s Dan Kaufman wrote this week, “part of a national Republican strategy to take control of election administration and to make it harder to vote.”

Wisconsin voters with disabilities have filed a lawsuit arguing that the state supreme court’s recent decision banning the returning of absentee ballots by caretakers violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the U.S. Constitution.

Of course, voter-suppression efforts aren’t limited to Wisconsin. Here are headlines related to voting rights in other states:

Abortion opponents push to remove ballot drop boxes ahead of Kansas amendment vote (Kansas City Star)
New Georgia election law allows any resident to challenge another voter’s eligibility (Atlanta Journal Constitution)
A new Georgia voting law reduced ballot drop box access in places that used them most (NPR)
Kari Lake wants to upend how Arizonans vote, how their votes are counted (Washington Post)

---

In the Documents: New Details About the Origins of the Arizona Senate’s Discredited Election ‘Audit’

March 7, 2022

Further review of records obtained by American Oversight in our investigation of the “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election reveal a letter from a state senator to then-Vice President Pence asking that he not certify Biden’s victory.

Legislative Leaders in Arizona, Wisconsin Were Sent Memos Regarding the Ability of State Lawmakers to Alter Selection of Electors Following 2020 Election

February 1, 2022

The memos, obtained by American Oversight, suggest that in November 2020, Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos sought legal advice about whether legislators had the power to alter the selection or actions of electors after the election had taken place.

December 2020 Emails to Arizona Lawmakers Reveal Election Deniers’ Plans for Scanning and Throwing Out ‘Invalid’ Ballots

January 24, 2022

The emails obtained by American Oversight, which outlined a plan to overturn Trump’s election loss in Arizona, also included members of Trump’s legal team.

Fake Electoral Certificates Obtained by American Oversight Draw Renewed Scrutiny

January 12, 2022

The phony documents were submitted to Congress by Republicans in several states who sought to overturn Biden’s 2020 election victory by casting the state’s electoral votes for Trump instead.

The Latest Attempt by Wisconsin Legislative Leaders to Undermine Election Has Been in the Works for Months

June 17, 2021

Emails uncovered by American Oversight reveal an early April meeting between legislative leaders and one of the former police officers hired to investigate the 2020 election in Wisconsin.

American Oversight Obtains Seven Phony Certificates of Pro-Trump Electors

March 2, 2021

The phony electoral vote certificates from seven states were submitted to Congress as part of the failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Investigations Update: Florida Vaccine Distribution, Anti-Protest Measures, and Trump’s Efforts to Overturn Georgia’s Election Results

February 9, 2021

See the latest in our investigations into the coronavirus pandemic response and into officials’ attempts to interfere with democracy.

Investigations Update: The Efforts by Trump — and Top Officials — to Overturn the Election

February 2, 2021

See the latest in our investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election and multiple state lawmakers’ ties to the Capitol attack.

ARIZONA (11)

Nancy Cottle*: Cottle is the first vice president of programs for the Arizona Federation of Republican Women. She has been active in Arizona politics for the past decade and holds various other positions on the Maricopa County Republican Committee and the AZGOP executive committee. She was issued a subpoena by the Department of Justice in June, according to the Washington Post.

Loraine B. Pellegrino*: Pellegrino has served as president of Ahwatukee Republican Women. She was issued a subpoena by the Department of Justice in June, according to the Washington Post.

Tyler Bowyer: Bowyer is the chief operating officer of Turning Point USA, a Phoenix-based nonprofit organization that advocates for conservative values in schools. He has previously worked for the Republican National Committee and the Maricopa County Republican Party.

Jake Hoffman: Hoffman is an Arizona state representative for the 12th District. Hoffman also runs a conservative digital marketing company, Rally Forge, that was banned from Facebook and suspended from Twitter for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on behalf of Turning Point Action, an affiliate of Turning Point USA. The company was enlisting and paying teens to share comments with right-wing opinions, including that mail-in ballots would lead to fraud and that coronavirus numbers were intentionally inflated. Experts told the Washington Post in 2020 that the effort was “among the most ambitious domestic influence campaigns uncovered this election cycle.”

Anthony Kern: From January 2015 until January 2021, Kern was an Arizona state representative for the 20th District. He is currently running for election to the Arizona state Senate to represent the 27th District. Kern, whose campaign has been endorsed by Trump, participated in the Jan. 6 riots in D.C. and has lied about breaching the U.S. Capitol building

Jim Lamon: Lamon is running for election to the U.S. Senate to represent Arizona. He is a veteran and was previously CEO of DEPCOM Power, a solar energy contractor, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Robert Montgomery: In 2020, Montgomery served as the chairman of the Cochise County Republican Committee.

Samuel I. Moorhead: Moorhead serves as the second vice chair of the Gila County Arizona Republican Party.

Greg Safsten: Safsten was until recently the executive director of the Republican Party of Arizona. He previously worked for U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs and former Rep. Matt Salmon, both of Arizona, in their U.S. House offices, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Dr. Kelli Ward: Ward is an osteopathic physician who has served as the chair of the Arizona Republican Party since 2019. Following the 2020 election, Ward aided Trump’s efforts to invalidate the election results and filed a number of lawsuits to nullify Arizona’s results. In 2016, she challenged the late U.S. Sen. John McCain in the Republican primary but lost with 39 percent of the vote. She previously served in the Arizona state Senate. She was issued a subpoena by the Department of Justice along with her husband in June, according to Politico.

Dr. Michael Ward: Ward met his wife, Kelli Ward, while he was serving in the Arizona Air National Guard. In 2019, he was accused of spitting in the eye of a former volunteer of his wife’s when she was a candidate for Senate because the volunteer went on to support her former political foe, Martha McSally. Michael Ward denied touching, pushing, threatening or spitting on the volunteer in an email to police, according to the Arizona Republic. He was issued a subpoena by the Department of Justice along with his wife in June, according to Politico.

GEORGIA (16)

Joseph Brannan: Brannan is treasurer of the Georgia Republican Party, a media executive, and a leader in the Muscogee County party.

James “Ken” Carroll: Carroll is assistant secretary for the Georgia Republican Party.

Vikki Townsend Consiglio: Consiglio is assistant treasurer for the Georgia Republican Party and is on the board of governors for the Georgia Republican Foundation.

Carolyn Hall Fisher: Fisher was until recently the first vice chairman for the Georgia Republican Party.

Burt Jones: Jones has been a member of the Georgia state Senate since 2013, representing the 25th District. He is the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor and is endorsed by Trump.

Gloria Kay Godwin: Godwin is a local Republican Party leader in Blackshear and the co-founder of the grassroots group Georgia Conservatives in Action, according to her LinkedIn profile. In September 2020, she was accused of stalking after allegedly attempting to interfere in a citizen effort to obtain signatures for a recall election petition for Godwin’s grandson, District Five City Council member Shawn Godwin. She told the Blackshear Times that she was unaware of the complaint.

David G. Hanna: Hanna was CEO and co-founder of Atlanticus Holdings Corporation, an Atlanta-based financial holding company, until he left the post in March 2021.

Mark W. Hennessy: Hennessy is the CEO of several car dealerships around the Atlanta area.

Mark Amick: Amick is on the board of governors for the Georgia Republican Foundation. In 2019, Amick unsuccessfully ran for city council in Milton. In 2020, he served as a poll watcher in Milton County and testified in a hearing after the election that he saw more than 9,000 votes wrongly go to Joe Biden during the first Georgia recount.

John Downey: Downey was a House district chair for the Cobb County Republican Party.

Cathleen Alston Latham: Latham is a teacher with the Georgia Virtual School, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Daryl Moody: Moody is a GOP donor who is currently the chairman of the Georgia Republican Foundation.

Brad Carver: A lawyer focused on energy, utilities, environmental and local government law, Carver is a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association. Carver represents clients before the Georgia Public Service Commission in the Georgia General Assembly. Federal agents delivered a subpoena to his home in June, according to the Washington Post.

David Shafer*: Shafer is chairman of the state GOP and a Georgia state senator from 2003 to 2019 who was state Senate president pro tempore for many of those years. In 2018, he ran for lieutenant governor and lost in the primary. He was also accused that year of sexual harassment by a lobbyist, but was cleared by the Senate ethics committee. Federal agents delivered a subpoena to his home in June, according to the Washington Post.

Shawn Still*: Still is the GOP nominee for Georgia state Senate to represent District 48. He is the president of Olympic Pool Plastering & Shotcrete and has served as chairman of the Georgia Republican Party Finance Committee and on the executive committee for the Georgia GOP.

C.B. Yadav: A small business owner in Camden County, Yadav is a member of the Georgians First Commission under the governor’s office. He was an early supporter of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s gubernatorial campaign and worked as part of his campaign’s “grassroots army.”

Slated to sign but replaced:

John A. Isakson: Isakson is the chief financial officer for Preferred Apartment Communities. His father, Johnny Isakson, served as a U.S. senator from Georgia from 2005 to 2019 and represented Georgia’s 6th Congressional District in the U.S. House from 1999 to 2005.

Patrick Gartland: Gartland has served as the Cobb County Republican Party’s representative on the board of election.

CJ Pearson: A conservative activist, political adviser and commentator on cable news, Pearson has served as the executive director of Young Georgians in Government and executive director of Teens for Trump. He recently served as the campaign manager for Vernon Jones, who lost his Republican primary runoff in June in a bid to win a congressional seat.

Susan Holmes: A member of the Georgia House of Representatives from the 129th District, Holmes has also served as mayor of Monticello for 12 years.

MICHIGAN (16)

Kathy Berden*: Berden is a national committeewoman of the Republican Party of Michigan who has worked for the GOP at the local, state and national level. Berden and her husband own an organic farm.

Rose Rook: A retired real estate agent, Rook was previously a Democrat and got involved with the Republican Party in 2016. She is the former Van Buren County GOP chair and served on the executive committee of the county party and as president of the Van Buren County Republican Women’s Club.

Mayra Rodriguez*: Rodriguez is the Grosse Pointe Farms chair for the 14th District Republican Committee.

Hank Choate: Choate is a dairy farmer who sits on the board of directors for the Michigan Milk Producers Association. In 2017, he met with Trump to discuss agricultural issues. He said he became involved in Republican politics in 2010 and went on to serve as chair of the Jackson County Republican Party for four years and served as chair of the party’s 7th District.

Meshawn Maddock: Maddock is the Michigan Republican Party co-chair and serves on the national advisory board of Women for Trump. She is co-owner of A1 Bail Bonds, a bail bondsman company, along with her spouse, GOP state Rep. Matt Maddock.

Mari-Ann Henry: Henry is treasurer of the Greater Oakland Republican Club, according to her LinkedIn profile.

John Haggard: Haggard is the owner of Haggard’s Plumbing and Heating and a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Clifford Frost: A real estate agent, Frost is a member of the Michigan Republican Party State Committee and board member for the Macomb County GOP. In 2018, Frost ran in the primary to represent the 28th District in the Michigan House but lost the race.

Kent Vanderwood: Vanderwood is vice president at the Timothy Group, which advances Christian organizations, and serves as committee chair for the Second District Republican Committee of Michigan.

Stanley Grot: Grot is the Shelby Township clerk and recently ran for the Michigan House but withdrew before the primary. He previously served on the Sterling Heights City Council and as a Macomb County commissioner. He also chairs the 10th District Republican Party. In 2018, he ran for secretary of state but abruptly dropped out of the race, which became the center of an alleged payoff scandal that resulted in Michigan Party Chair Ron Weiser paying a $200,000 state fine for violating campaign finance law.

Marian Sheridan: Sheridan is the director of the Lakes Area Tea Party and co-founder of the Michigan Conservative Coalition, a right-wing group founded by the Maddocks. She serves on the executive board of the Oakland County Republican Party and as grassroots vice chair for the Michigan Republican Party. In February 2021, she asked Republicans to photograph addresses used on some voter registrations, claiming there were “thousands of voters in Wayne County who were not registered at legal addresses.” In 2020, she trained hundreds of poll challengers and joined as plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to uphold the state’s 8 p.m. Election Day deadline for returning absentee ballots.

Timothy King: King sits on the executive committee of the Washtenaw County Republican Party and on the 12th District Republican Committee. In 2020, he unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the Washtenaw County Commission.

James Renner: Renner was a precinct delegate in 2020 for Watertown Township.

Michele Lundgren: A photographer from Detroit, Lundgren was elected in 2020 to serve as the Republican delegate for her precinct to the county convention.

Amy Facchinello: Facchinello serves on the school board in Grand Blanc and has been the subject of protests over her QAnon social media posts. Facchinello has refused to resign. She has also been a precinct delegate and served on the executive board of the Genesee County Republican Party.

Ken Thompson: Biographical information for Thompson could not be obtained.

Slated to sign but replaced:

Terri Lynn Land: Land served as Michigan secretary of state as a Republican from 2003 through 2010. In 2014, she lost the U.S. Senate race to Democrat Gary Peters. She also serves on the Wayne State University Board of Governors.

Gerald Wall: Wall has served as the chair of the Roscommon County Republican Party for more than 20 years. An army veteran, Wall worked for General Motors but is now retired, according to his LinkedIn profile.

NEW MEXICO (5)

Jewll Powdrell*: Powdrell is a retired businessman and was managing director at ABQ Sales & Marketing Group, according to his LinkedIn profile. He told the Albuquerque Journal that he has “no regrets, whatsoever” about putting his name on the false elector document. Powdrell, a Black man, said he denounces the Black Lives Matter movement and criticizes politicians who lump Black people into one group.

Deborah W. Maestas*: Maestas is the former chair of the Republican Party of New Mexico. Previously, she served as deputy campaign manager on Allen Weh’s unsuccessful 2014 U.S. Senate campaign and as president of CSI Aviation.

Lupe Garcia: Garcia is a business owner in Albuquerque.

Rosie Tripp: Tripp has served as the national committeewoman for the Republican Party of New Mexico, a former Socorro County commissioner and a former city councilwoman in Socorro.

Anissa Ford-Tinnin: Ford-Tinnin is the former executive director of the state Republican Party.

Slated to sign but replaced:

Harvey Yates: Yates is the national committeeman for the Republican Party of New Mexico. He served as chair of the party from 2009 to 2010.

NEVADA (6)

Michael J. McDonald*: The chair of the Nevada Republican Party, McDonald is a former member of the Las Vegas City Council.

James DeGraffenreid*: DeGraffenreid has served as vice chairman of the Nevada Republican Party and is president of an insurance company.

Durward James Hindle III: Hindle is vice chair of the Nevada Republican Committee and is a managing partner at Cascade Survey Research, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Jesse Law: Law was recently elected chairman of the Clark County Republican Party and was a staffer on the Trump campaign.

Shawn Meehan: Meehan serves on the board of the Douglas County Republican Party and is founder of the Guard the Constitution Project, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Eileen Rice: Rice serves on the board of the Douglas County Republican Party.

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Groups from [Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all allegedly met in December 2020 and sent lists of so-called alternate electors to the National Archives after the 2020 election.

PENNSYLVANIA (20)

Bill Bachenberg*: Bachenberg is the owner of Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays and an NRA board member. He and his wife operate Camp Freedom, a nonprofit that offers shooting experiences for veterans and first responders with disabilities and their families.

Lou Barletta: Barletta recently ran for governor of Pennsylvania. He previously served as a member of the U.S. House, representing Pennsylvania’s 11th Congressional District from 2011 to 2019, and as mayor of Hazleton from 2000 to 2010.

Tom Carroll: Carroll was recently elected a Northampton County Republican Committee member. He ran for district attorney in Northampton County in 2019 and refused to concede the race, citing “overwhelming irregularities” in how the election was administered. He previously served as assistant district attorney for the county but resigned after a Black colleague reported that he put a stuffed monkey with a shirt reading “Loudmouth” on her keyboard.

Ted Christian: Christian was the Pennsylvania state director for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He runs the Philadelphia office for lobbying firm Duane Morris Government Strategies.

Chuck Coccodrilli: Coccodrilli was a board member with the Pennsylvania Great Frontier PAC and an advocate and board member at Camp Freedom. He died in October 2021 after an illness.

Bernadette Comfort: Comfort is the vice chairwoman for the Pennsylvania Republican Party. She works for Novak Strategic Advisors and has worked with the party to increase the number of women in decision-making positions. She was also a top aide to former Pennsylvania first lady Michele Ridge in the 1990s.

Sam DeMarco III: DeMarco is the chairman of the Allegheny County Republican Party. He was until recently an at-large member of the Allegheny County Council in Pennsylvania and a member of the Allegheny County Board of Elections but was required to step down from the position in order to run for Congress in Pennsylvania’s 17th District. The FBI interviewed him at his home in June and served him a subpoena about his role in the scheme.

Marcela Diaz-Myers: Diaz-Myers is the chairwoman of PA GOP Hispanic Advisory Council.

Christie DiEsposti: DiEsposti is an account representative at Pure Water Technology, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Josephine Ferro: Ferro was elected Monroe County Register of Wills in 2015 and is the former president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Republican Women.

Charlie Gerow: Gerow recently ran for governor of Pennsylvania but lost in the primary. He is a GOP political strategist, the vice chair of the American Conservative Union, and the CEO of Quantum Communications, a Harrisburg-based public relations firm. Last July, he cooperated with a police investigation after he was involved in a fatal crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which he says he did not cause.

Kevin Harley: Harley works with Gerow as managing director of Quantum Communications and has served as a spokesperson for Gerow. He has also worked as press secretary for former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett.

Leah Hoopes: Hoopes is a small business owner and Republican committeewoman for Bethel Township in Delaware County who served as a poll watcher in 2020. She was named as a defendant in a Delaware County voting machine supervisor’s lawsuit alleging that Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that election officials tampered with the election made the supervisor the subject of physical threats.

Ash Khare: An immigrant from India and retired engineer, Khare is active in the Pennsylvania Republican Party and describes himself as a political junkie.

Andre McCoy: McCoy is a director of government affairs with more than 30 years of military service and civilian experience, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Lisa Patton*: Patton was the director of events in Pennsylvania for Trump’s campaign. She was the owner of Twin Ponds Family Recreation Center in Harrisburg, according to her LinkedIn.

Pat Poprik: Poprik is the chair of the Bucks County Republican Committee.

Andy Reilly: Reilly is a national committeeman for the Republican Party of Pennsylvania and former secretary for the party. Reilly was previously elected twice to serve as a member of the Delaware County Council. He’s also managing partner at the law firm Swartz Campbell LLC.

Suk Smith: Smith is owner of Patriot Arms Inc., a firearms training center, and Dragons Way School of Kenpo Inc., a martial arts school in Carlisle.

Calvin Tucker: Tucker is deputy chairman and director of engagement and advancement for the Pennsylvania Republican Party. In 2016, he served as a media surrogate and African American adviser to Trump’s campaign.

Slated to sign but replaced:

Robert Asher: Asher has held several positions in the Pennsylvania Republican Party and has held various local elected offices. While chairman of the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania, he was convicted in 1987 of conspiracy and bribery, among other charges, for accepting bribes in exchange for awarding a state contract. He resigned from the position and served one year in federal prison.

Lawrence Tabas: Tabas is chairman of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, longtime general counsel to the party and a well-known Philadelphia elections attorney. Before the 2020 election, Tabas told the Atlantic that he had spoken with the Trump reelection campaign about the possibility that Republican-controlled legislatures could directly appoint electors, but he claimed the comments were taken out of context.

Thomas Marino: Marino was a member of the U.S. House from 2011 until 2019, when he abruptly resigned two weeks into his term. He has also served as U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. In 2017, Trump nominated him to be the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, but he withdrew from consideration after reports that he had crafted a bill that protected pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors and made it harder for the federal government to tackle the opioid crisis.

Lance Stange: Stange works for Novak Strategic Advisors and has served as chairman of the northeast caucus of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania.

Carolyn Welsh: Welsh was the sheriff of Chester County for two decades until 2019 and was one of Trump’s earliest boosters in Pennsylvania, often speaking at his rallies. In March, she entered a no-contest plea to misdemeanor theft charges for allegedly allowing employees to improperly collect comp time, paid for by tax dollars, for volunteering at fundraisers for the office’s K-9 unit. A judge ordered her to pay restitution and a fine.

Christine Toretti: Toretti is the national committeewoman for the Pennsylvania Republican Party and is the former chairman and CEO of S. W. Jack Drilling Co., an oil and gas company involved in fracking.

Robert Gleason: Gleason was formerly the chair of the Pennsylvania Republican Party. He is a businessman who was appointed by Trump in 2018 to the board of visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

WISCONSIN (10)

Andrew Hitt*: The chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin from 2019 until 2021, Hitt is a partner at consulting and lobbying firm Michael Best Strategies.

Kelly Ruh*: Ruh was an alderperson for De Pere but lost her bid for reelection in April. She has also been chairwoman of the 8th Congressional District Republican Party and a controller for Bay Industries in Green Bay.

Carol Brunner: Brunner is the vice chairwoman of Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District Republican Party.

Edward Scott Grabins: Chairman of the Dane County Republican Party, Grabins is a technology professional, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Bill Feehan: A business manager based in La Crosse, Feehan was a 2012 candidate for District 32 of the Wisconsin state Senate.

Robert F. Spindell Jr.: Spindell has been a commissioner on the Wisconsin Election Commission since 2019 and recently ran to chair the commission and lost. After Biden won the election, Spindell appeared at a “stop the steal” rally at the state Capitol.

Kathy Kiernan: Kiernan is the 5th Congressional District chairman for the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

Darryl Carlson: Currently executive director of conservative organization No Better Friend Corp., Carlson ran an unsuccessful campaign in 2014 for the Wisconsin State Assembly. He is a veteran and has also represented the 3rd aldermanic district in Sheboygan.

Pam Travis: Travis has served as treasurer of the Wisconsin Federation of Republican Women and is currently the 7th Congressional District vice chairman for the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

Mary Buestrin: A former national committeewoman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, Buestrin says she has done volunteer work supporting Republican candidates for more than 50 years.

Slated to appear but replaced:

Tom Schreibel: Schreibel is a partner at consulting and lobbying firm Michael Best Strategies and a national committeeman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

ggl 7 22

PDATED Trump's fake electors: Here's the full list

https://www.azmirror.com › 2022/06/29 › updated-tru...

Jun 29, 2022 — The 84 people who signed bogus documents claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 election include dozens of prominent Republicans.

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